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DevOps or Development and Operations are the tools and processes used by modern businesses to bridge the gap between their development and operations teams. This in turn improves the software development life cycle and ensures the timed delivery of the products and services. It also improves the customer experience and allows the business to understand the client’s requirements even better.
Although Agile development provides many advantages, it still lacks on various fronts like documentation and strategies. With potholes like these, the development team can easily fall off project track. Therefore, new methodologies and processes need to be developed to fill such gaps. In the year 2009, DevOps was introduced to the world that bridged the gap between the operations and development team.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what Azure DevOps Engineers are with the roles and responsibilities they need to fulfill in an organization.
What is DevOps?
DevOps represents a combination of philosophies, processes, and strategies that enables a business to solve its development problems and improve its ability to deliver the products at high velocity. Several Businesses are using DevOps methodologies to efficiently carry out their development processes.
In an organization, DevOps strategies bridge the gap between development and operations teams of IT departments. Their strategies are also used to automate the process of development and swiftly deliver it in the given period. DevOps methodologies include real-time monitoring, configuration management, continuous integration, cloud computing microservices, containers, and incident management.
What is an Azure DevOps Engineer?
The Azure DevOps are the professionals who use Microsoft’s Software-as-a-Service(SaaS) to manage the projects, collaborate with development and operations teams, build applications, and deploy them in a given period. The DevOps Engineer has a good knowledge of the entire Software development life cycle (SDLC) and application development. He can also apply DevOps methodologies to automate the development and testing process by creating digital pipelines.
According to the DevOps skill report in the year 2020, the global DevOps was expected to reach a staggering $12.85 billion by the year 2025. This in turn has increased the demand for skilled DevOps engineers with an average salary of $108,000. Companies hire Azure DevOps Engineers for different job roles such as Automation Architects, DevOps consultants, DevOps Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, managers, and Test Engineers.
These trends of increasing demand for DevOps engineers show how bright the future of this career will be. However, the average salary for a fresher engineer is not much as compared to other IT professionals due to the unsaturated market. To overcome this hurdle, you need to accumulate more experience and skills that relate to the technology.
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Now that you’ve understood what Azure DevOps Engineers are, let’s go through the roles and responsibilities one has to fulfill.
Roles and Responsibilities of an Azure DevOps Engineer
As discussed earlier, DevOps engineers have a deep understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle models and various automation tools. They collaborate with the developers and other IT professionals to oversee the development process. They also help the team leaders to create better scripting and coding techniques for improving the product performance and meet the customer requirements.
Understanding the role of DevOps engineers as they deal with a dynamic workspace where the product has to evolve with the changing requirements of the clients. As a DevOps engineer, you need to frequently change the deployment strategies and automate several elements of the software.
Objective Responsibilities of DevOps Engineer
DevOps Engineers work with different IT departments and development teams to implement software strategies. They need to be flexible with the plans, deal with complex situations, assure product quality, and collaborate with different development teams. So, below are the key responsibilities that a DevOps Engineer needs to fulfill:
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Documentation
The first step in software engineering is to understand the requirements of clients and the features or resources you need to fulfill them. As a DevOps Engineer, you need to consult with the clients, stakeholders, and developers to understand the requirements from both sides. You should document all these requirements and use them for creating the plan of execution.
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System Analysis
Analyzing the current technologies used by the company and introduce new strategies to improve the development life cycle.
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Design and Development
One of the key responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer is to provide such IT solutions to improve the development infrastructure of the organization. They can also automate several processes and reduce the risk occurring while coding, testing, and deploying the software products.
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Collaboration and Support
To yield good results, you should monitor and perform technical analysis of the application development process. You should also collaborate with operations and development teams to mitigate the risks associated with the product life-cycle and improve the overall scalability and reliability of the application.
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Software Testing
Software testing is a crucial part of the SDLC model and consumes a substantial amount of time. Therefore, it is important for engineers to automate the process of testing various software and minimize errors.
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Deployment
Another important aspect that DevOps Engineers need to oversee is software deployment. They should fix the software production environment and automate the deployment process for new updates.
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Performance Management
Use business-oriented operations to achieve successful development and identify alternative solutions for reducing the gap between the productions and deployment period.
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Troubleshooting
Perform routine analysis of the production environment and ensure that operations for each project run smoothly.
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Versatility
In addition to the above-mentioned responsibilities, a DevOps engineer needs to be adaptive and implement new technologies to make the process more efficient.
Roles of a DevOps Engineer
Following are the Job roles emerging for the DevOps Engineers:
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DevOps Evangelist
An Evangelist promotes the benefits of implementing DevOps methodologies in an organization and makes sure that the IT professionals are well-trained to implement them in the changes.
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The Release Manager
The release managers work closely with the development team and analyze the technical hurdles that might affect the product life cycle. The creation and release managers are also responsible for maintaining an end-to-end production chain for smooth deliveries.
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Automation Architect
Companies rely heavily on automation as it positively affects the production systems and reduces the period of each development phase. Thus, Automation architects have the responsibility to
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Software Developer/Tester
Software development also comes under DevOps with additional roles and responsibilities. Also, the testing is heavily influenced by the strategies designed using DevOps methodologies. The job role is sometimes called DevTestops. They automate the testing phase which ensures that the accuracy is maintained in every testing cycle.
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The Experience Assurance (XA) Professional
Similar to quality assurance, the XA professionals ensure that the end product contains all the functionalities and features as required by the clients. If not, he analyzes the whole and suggests solutions to enhance the customer experience. Play Online Free Solitaire Game
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Security Engineer
In the traditional waterfall models, application security was a non-functional requirement and didn’t have much attention. However, DevOps-minded businesses have security engineers to make sure that their product has passed all the security tests to avoid any hassle at the final stage.
Conclusion
The quick setup, easy collaborations, Elastic scale, and data security of Azure DevOps services enabled thousands of companies to improve their application development process. DevOps Engineers have many job roles associated with it and new opportunities are emerging due to its wide adaptability in different industries worldwide. You can also learn DevOps through various courses and make a career in this lucrative market.
