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DevOps - what is it, why, and how much is it in demand?



A few years ago, a new specialty DevOps engineer appeared in IT. She quickly became one of the most popular and sought after in the market. But the paradox is that the popularity of DevOps is partly due to the fact that companies hiring such specialists often confuse them with representatives of other professions. 
 
This article is devoted to analyzing the nuances of the DevOps profession, the current market situation and prospects. We figured out this difficult issue with the help of the Dean of the DevOps faculty at GeekBrains at Dmitry Burkovsky's online university of GeekUniversity.


So what exactly is DevOps?


The term itself stands for Development Operations. This is not so much a specialty as an approach to organizing work in a medium or large company when preparing a product or service. The fact is that different departments of one company participate in the preparation process, and their actions are far from always well coordinated. 
 
So, developers, for example, do not always know what problems arise for users who work with an released program or service. Technical support - knows everything perfectly, but she may not be aware of what is “inside” the software. And here comes the DevOps engineer, who helps coordinate the development process, helps automate processes, improves their transparency. 
 
The DevOps concept brings people, processes and tools together. 
 

What should a DevOps engineer know and be able to do?


According to one of the most famous adherents of the DevOps concept, Joe Sanchez, a representative of the profession should well understand the nuances of the concept itself, have experience in administering both Windows and Linux systems, understand the program code written in different languages, work Chef, Puppet, Ansible. It is clear that to parse the code you need to know several programming languages, and not just know, but also have experience in development. And the experience of testing ready-made software products and services is also very desirable. 
 
But ideally, this level of experience and knowledge is far from every representative of the IT sphere. Here is a set of minimum knowledge and experience necessary for a good DevOps:

  • GNU / Linux OS, Windows.
  • At least 1 programming language (Python, Go, Ruby).
  • The shell scripting language is bash for Linux and powershell for Windows.
  • Version Control System - Git.
  • Configuration Management Systems (Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
  • At least one of the platforms for container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, Amazon EC2 Container Service, Microsoft Azure Container Service).
  • Ability to work with cloud providers (for example: AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) using Terraform, to know how the application is deployed to the cloud.
  • Ability to configure the CI / CD pipeline (Jenkins, GitLab), ELK stack, monitoring systems (Zabbix, Prometheus).

And here is a list of skills that DevOps specialists most often point to at Haber Career.

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In addition, the DevOps specialist must understand the needs and requirements of the business, see its role in the development process and be able to build the process taking into account the interest of the customer. 


And what about the entry threshold?


The list of knowledge and experience was presented in vain above. Now it’s easier to understand who can become a DevOps specialist. It turns out that the easiest way to go into this profession is for representatives of other IT specialties, especially system administrators and developers. And that, and others can quickly build up the missing amount of experience and knowledge. They already have half of the required set, and often more than half.
 
And great DevOps engineers come from testers. They know what and how it works, aware of the shortcomings and shortcomings of the software and hardware. We can say that a tester who knows programming languages ​​and knows how to write programs - without five minutes DevOps.
 
But it will be difficult for a representative of a non-technical specialty who has never dealt with either development or system administration. Of course, nothing is impossible, but nevertheless, beginners need to adequately assess their strengths. It will take a lot of time to get the required “baggage”. 


Where can DevOps work?


A large company whose work is directly or indirectly related to application development and administration of hardware. The maximum deficit in DevOps engineers is among companies that provide a large number of services to end users. These are banks, telecom operators, the largest Internet providers, etc. Among the companies that actively hire DevOps engineers are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Adobe.
 
Introducing DevOps and small business startups, but for many of these companies, inviting DevOps engineers is more a tribute to fashion than a real necessity. Of course, there are exceptions, but there are not many. Small companies need, rather, “a Swiss, a reaper, and a dude,” that is, a person who is able to work in a number of areas. A good service station can handle all this. The fact is that small business is important speed of work, the optimization of work processes is critical for medium and large businesses. 

Here are some vacancies (you can follow the new ones on Habr Career using this link ):

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Salary DevOps in Russia and the world


In Russia, the average salary of a DevOps engineer is about 132 thousand rubles per month. These are the calculations of the salary calculator of the Habr Career service, made on the basis of 170 questionnaires for the 2nd half of 2020. Yes, the sample is not that big, but it’s quite suitable as the “average temperature in the hospital”.  There are salaries of 250 thousand rubles, there are about 80 thousand and a little lower. It all depends on the company, qualifications and the specialist himself, of course.  As for other countries, salary statistics are also known. Stack Overflow specialists did a good job analyzing the profiles of about 90 thousand people - not only DevOps, but also representatives of technical specialties in general. It turned out that Engineering Manager and just DevOps get the most. 
 
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DevOps-engineer receives about $ 71 thousand a year. According to the resource Ziprecruiter.com, the salary of a professional in this area is from $ 86 thousand a year. Well, the Payscale.com service shows figures that are quite pleasant to the eye - the average salary of a DevOps specialist, according to the service, exceeds $ 91 thousand. And this is the salary of a junior specialist, the senior can get $ 135 thousand. 
 
As a conclusion, it is worth saying that the demand for DevOps is gradually growing, demand for specialists of any level exceeds supply. So if you want, you can try yourself in this area. True, one must remember that desire alone is not enough. You need to constantly develop, learn and work.

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