What are the essential skills for AWS DevOps engineers?

Engineers with AWS DevOps frequently travel. The good ones maintain a cross-disciplinary skill set that includes cloud, development, operations, continuous delivery, data, security, and more.

The abilities that AWS DevOps Engineers must master in order to excel in their position are listed below.

1.Continuous delivery:

If you want to be successful in this role, you must possess a deep understanding of continuous delivery (CD) theory, concepts, and their actual application. You will require both familiarity with CD technologies and systems as well as a thorough understanding of their inner workings in order to integrate diverse tools and systems to create fully effective, coherent delivery pipelines. Committing, merging, building, testing, packaging, and releasing code are only a few of the tasks involved in the software release process.

If you intend to use the native AWS services for your continuous delivery pipelines, you must be familiar with AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline. You might also need to be familiar with other CD tools and systems, such as GitHub, Jenkins, GitLab, Spinnaker, and Travis.

2.Cloud:

An AWS DevOps engineer should be familiar with AWS resources, services, and best practices. Product development teams will get in touch with you with questions regarding various services as well as requests for guidance on when and which service to use. You should therefore be knowledgeable about the vast array of AWS services, their limitations, and other (non-AWS) options that might be more suitable in specific situations.

Your understanding of cloud computing will help you plan and develop cloud native systems, manage the complexity of cloud systems, and ensure best practices are followed when leveraging a variety of cloud service providers. You'll think about the benefits and drawbacks of using IaaS services as opposed to PaaS and other managed services while planning and making recommendations.

3.Observability:

Oh my, logging, monitoring, and alerting! Although it's great to release a new application into production, knowing what it does makes it much better. An important area of research for this function is observability. An AWS DevOps engineer is in charge of implementing appropriate monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions for an application and the platforms it uses. Application performance monitoring, or APM, can facilitate the debugging of custom code and provide insightful information about how an application functions. There are many APM tools, including New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and others. You must be highly familiar with AWS X-Ray, Amazon SNS, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Kibana on the AWS side, as well as Amazon CloudWatch (including CloudWatch Agent, CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Alarms, and CloudWatch Events). Additional apparatus Other applications you may utilise Among the tools used in this field are Syslog, logrotate, logstash, Filebeat, Nagios, InfluxDB, Prometheus, and Grafana.

4.Code for infrastructure:

AWS Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions like CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi, and AWS CDK are used by AWS DevOps Engineers to guarantee that the systems they are in charge of are produced in a repeatable manner (Cloud Development Kit). The use of IaC ensures that cloud objects are code-documented, version-controlled, and able to be reliably replaced with the appropriate IaC provisioning tool.

5.Implementation Management:

An IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) configuration management tool should be used to document and set up EC2 instances after they have been launched. In this area, some of the more well-liked alternatives are Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack. In businesses where Windows is the preferred infrastructure, PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) may be the best tool for the job.

6. Packaging:

Many contemporary enterprises are switching from the conventional deployment methodologies of pushing software to VMs to a containerized system environment. Configuration management loses a lot of importance in the containerized environment, but you'll also need to be conversant with a whole new set of container-related technologies. These tools include Kubernetes (which has a large ecosystem of tools, apps, and services), Docker Engine, Docker Swarm, systemd-nspawn, LXC, container registries, and many others.

7.Operations:

Logging, monitoring, and alerting are the most frequently mentioned components of IT operations. To effectively operate, run, or manage production systems, you must have these things in place. These were discussed in the observability section up top. Responding to, debugging, and resolving problems as they arise is a significant aspect of the Ops function. You must have experience working with and troubleshooting operating systems including Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and Windows if you want to respond to problems quickly and efficiently. Additionally, you'll need to be knowledgeable about middleware tools like load balancers, various application environments, and runtimes, as well as web servers like Apache, nginx, Tomcat, and Node.js.

An essential role for a database manager might also be database administration. (Dev)Ops position You'll need to be familiar with data stores like PostgreSQL and MySQL to succeed here. Additionally, you should be able to read and write a little SQL code. You should also be more familiar with NoSQL data stores like Cassandra, MongoDB, AWS DynamoDB, and perhaps even one or more graph databases.

8.Automation:

The site reliability engineer's purpose is to eliminate labor, and the DevOps engineer's mission is also extremely appropriate. You'll need knowledge and proficiency with scripting languages like bash, GNU utilities, Python, JavaScript, and PowerShell on the Windows side in your desire to automate everything. Cron, AWS Lambda (the serverless functions service), CloudWatch Events, SNS, and other terms should be familiar to you.

9. Working together and communicating:

The cultural aspect of DevOps is last, but certainly not least. Even while the word "DevOps" can represent a variety of things to a variety of people, CAMS—culture, automation, measurement, and sharing—is one of the greatest places to start when discussing this change in our industry. The main goal of DevOps is to eliminate barriers between IT operations and development. Developers no longer "throw code over the wall" to operations in the new DevOps era. With everyone playing a part in the success of the code, with these applications and the value being provided to consumers, we now want to be one big happy family. As a result, software developers and (Dev)Ops engineers must collaborate closely. The ability to collaborate and communicate effectively is required for any candidate for the essential position of a DevOps engineer.

Conclusion:

You need a blend of inborn soft skills and technical expertise to be successful in the DevOps job path. Together, these two essential characteristics support your development. Your technical expertise will enable you to build a DevOps system that is incredibly productive. Soft skills, on the other hand, will enable you to deliver the highest level of client satisfaction.

With the help of Great Learning's cloud computing courses, you may advance your skills and land the job of your dreams by learning DevOps and other similar topics.

If you are brand-new to the DevOps industry, the list of required skills may appear overwhelming to you. However, these are the main DevOps engineer abilities that employers are searching for, so mastering them will give your CV a strong advantage. We hope that this post was able to provide some clarity regarding the DevOps abilities necessary to develop a lucrative career.