Roadmap to become a devOps engineer 2024

Roadmap to a DevOps Engineer: A Step-by-Step Guide

The IT landscape is moving too quick, and the new indispensable role in today’s technology landscape is that of the DevOps engineer. The role of the DevOps engineer is to bridge the gap between the development team and operations and ensures that there are constant releases with as high reliability and efficiency in the code. Being a DevOps engineer will require an individual to have intimate knowledge of software development, IT operations, and automation tools, among other important required skills. In this all-encompassing roadmap, we will walk you through the key skills, tools, and steps you must take to succeed on a career path as a DevOps engineer.

1. The Role of the DevOps Engineer

Knowledge of the fundamentals of a DevOps engineer’s work is essential before entering this learning path

Automation: The code-builds, testing, and deployments are fully automated by DevOps engineers and, therefore limit the percentage of intervention in the process involving manual work.
Teamwork: Integrate development, QA, and IT teams to streamline the process of SDLC.
Monitor and Optimize: Keep applications running and the infrastructure from getting unstable with optimum resource usage.
Implement CI/CD-Design: CI and CD pipelines that drive the advancement of easy code deployment automatically and with ease.
Infrastructure as Code: automation and management of infrastructure through code. Examples: Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.

The above will take you to the right skills and knowledge.

2. Learn a Programming Language

A strong background in programming and scripting languages should be excellent for a good DevOps engineer. You do not have to be a software developer, but code is important to automate tasks, build CI/CD pipelines, and even write deployment custom scripts.

Key Programming Languages in DevOps:

Python: This is one of the most common programming languages when it comes to automation and infrastructure management.
Bash/Shell Scripting: Bash/Shell Scripting is the ability to work on an environment based on Linux, as well as the possibility of automating tasks given the use of command lines.
Go: This is one of the most widely used languages when it comes to developing cloud-native tools and applications, as they are very light and efficient.
Ruby: If you are talking about the automation of infrastructure, then it would be useful, especially if working with tools such as Chef and Puppet.

3. Be Familiar with Operating Systems

DevOps engineers deal with a large number of operating systems. However, the most important one is Linux as the majority player in the cloud environment and infrastructure.
Important Operating Systems:

Linux: Aware of the command lines, file systems, and overall management system. Able to administer users and permission, services, system resources.
Windows: Much less prevalent in DevOps, though certain industries are using Windows for development and production.

4. Networking and Security Fundamentals

A good DevOps engineer will be aware of some basic network and security concepts relating to the scalability, security, and reliability of systems.

Basic Networking Concepts:

TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS: A good DevOps engineer needs to have a general knowledge of how web applications can communicate between each other in a network.
Firewalls and VPNs: These are absolutely essential to ensure that applications and infrastructures are secure
Load Balancers: Unless you know something about load balancing, you cannot understand how you’re going to distribute traffic across multiple servers.

Security:

SSL/TLS: Encrypt data in transit and its transfer over the internet
IAM (Identity Access Management): Control access to resources within cloud

5. Learn Version Control with Git

Version control is one crucial piece of the DevOps toolchain that can offer code changes in teams. One widely adopted version control system today is Git.

Key Skills

Git Fundamentals: Cloning, branching, committing, merging and pushing code to repos.
Git Workflows: Become a master of Gitflow and other methods to manage dev teams working on the same product.

6. Lead on Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

CI/CD pipelines test and automatically deploy your code, and the features go live with high quality in a very short time frame.

Main Tools:

Jenkins: probably most used tool for automating CI/CD at DevOps
GitLab CI: directly integrated into the repositories of GitLab to be directly at hand.
Circle CI: fast, scalable CI/CD pipelines.

Key Concepts:

Continuous Integration: Run tests on every commit so new code changes get continuously tested
Continuous Deployment: Automates the deployment of all successful code changes to production

7. Locate IaC

The DevOps engineer codes Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This makes it possible to manage and provision infrastructure resources by using machine-readable configuration files instead of doing this manually .

That means the given tools below are used to influence IaC:

Terraform: Terraform is an open-source utility to build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently.
AWS CloudFormation: It automates orchestration for any type of resources on AWS using templates.
Ansible : Automate the provision of software, configuration management, and deploying applications.
Chef/Puppet : Automate the infrastructure to manage large environments with big configurations.

8. Developing Cloud Computing Skills

The heart of DevOps is cloud computing. Understand how cloud infrastructure works, how to deploy into the cloud, and how to manage cloud services.

Primary Cloud Providers:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) : The best-in-class cloud provider has an elaborate system for any kind of services-from computing and machine learning to databases.
Microsoft Azure : This is a serious player in cloud space with extensive integrations with enterprise solutions.
Google Cloud Platform: Advances in ML and big data processing.

Important Topics

Compute Services: EC2, VM, Compute Engine
Storage: S3, Blob Storage, Cloud Storage
Networking: Master VPC, subnets, peering concepts
Serverless Architecture: Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions.

9. Learn Monitoring and Logging Tools

Monitoring applications and infrastructure would be an essential activity for real-time detection and fixing of issues. Several monitoring tools should be known to DevOps engineers.

Important Tools:

Prometheus: Monitoring system as well as time series database, open-source.
Grafana: Visualization tool for monitor data.
ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana): Used for log analysis and search for large volumes of log data.
Nagios: Is used as an infrastructure monitoring tool for systems, networks, and servers.

10. Containerization and Orchestration

Containers enable you to run applications exactly the same way across environments. In order to run tens of thousands of containers, container orchestration tools like Kubernetes come into the picture.

Key Tools:

Docker: Learn how to create, manage and deploy containers.
Kubernetes: The leader in container orchestration for automating application deployment, scaling, and management across an entire lifecycle.

Key Concepts:

Containerization: Running applications together with their direct dependencies as a single entity.
Orchestration: Automatic deployment, configuration, operation, and scaling of multiple containers.

11. Real-world Projects on DevOps

While there is theory that needs to be understood, the skill as a DevOps engineer comes in by applying. It is where experience comes into view. You are exposed to the nitty-gritty details of DevOps. You are given a portfolio that accredits you in your work.

Example Projects:

CI/CD Pipeline: write a pipeline that can deploy, test, build a web application
Terraform: Infrastructure as Code; Build/Deploy Cloud Infrastructure
Monitor an Application using Prometheus and Grafana; set up metrics for dashboarding.

12. Get Certified

Certifications are formal approvals of your skills. They will make you competitive within the market. Although it’s not necessarily required to gain certification, the proper organizations ones will ensure improved opportunities for a better job.

Some Recommendations for Certification

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional: it proves that your testing and deployment skills of AWS-based infrastructure are done with minimal or no human intervention.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA): The candidate must be aware of running a Kubernetes environment.
Azure DevOps Engineer Expert: Special for engineers working in the environment of Azure.

DevOps is an ever-changing field with new tools and approaches in use every day. Stay updated about the latest trends and innovations happening in the DevOps ecosystem.

Conclusion

Being a DevOps engineer, one of those careers that connect technical know-how with collaborative skills and hence highly rewarding, it is a boon to follow this roadmap and develop skills constantly.

For more informative blogs and roadmaps – Click Here

Roadmap to become a devOps engineer 2024