When does the role of DevOps Engineer come into play for your Businesses?

Primarily, the role of DevOps Engineers in businesses reduces communication and collaboration challenges in the IT organization. Role of DevOps Engineers helps companies increase revenue, improve agility, lower down the operational costs, and bolster competitiveness.

From this blog, you can learn to benefit your business from DevOps Engineers. There are 5 major reasons when businesses should embrace the role of DevOps engineer:

1. When your business needs an Improved agility

The agile methodology is the backbone of DevOps technology. Agility in DevOps is all about the rapid delivery of innovation and value to the market. DevOps-engineers in companies deploy code 46x faster, demonstrate 96x better failure recovery rate, and implement changes 440x faster than their competition with no DevOps professionals on board.

2. When your business needs a Higher operational efficiency

DevOps engineers reduce the amount of redundant manual tasks with automation, allowing employees to do more with less. Fullstack DevOps truly increases employee productivity by 51% while reducing the total app development time by 26%. This translates to lower operational costs but higher operational efficiency for the entire organization.

3. When you need to increase the business revenue

According to DevOps.com data, “On average companies that use Fullstack DevOps see a 20% increase in annual revenue.” One of the most important benefits of DevOps technology is its increased velocity which increases your business revenue. Companies gain a competitive advantage by being able to adapt to changing markets and become more efficient in achieving their business revenues.

4. When you want to improve customer experience & satisfaction

With the hiring of  DevOps engineers, companies can improve customer experience and satisfaction. According to CA Technologies research, companies that adopt DevOps tools see an average of 45% improvement in customer satisfaction and a whopping 74% increase in customer experience. Better customer experience leads to greater customer loyalty, customer retention, enhanced sales, and greater ROI.

5. When you want to make your business more competitive

DevOps tools make businesses more competitive. This is pretty much self-explanatory – when you rapidly release higher-quality apps to the market, continuously collect and analyze feedback, and consistently act on that feedback to further improve the quality of your product, you can better compete with other companies in your space. It will push you into the area where your business is more competitive and earns more revenue. Fullstack DevOps is an investment that brings long-lasting benefits to businesses globally.

Why does your business need a DevOps engineer?

Now, let’s see why your business needs a DevOps engineer. Though there is ‘n’ number of reasons for this, here are some prominent reasons:

Recommended Reading: 10 Tips to Remember while Hiring DevOps Engineer

1. DevOps Engineers facilitate Faster Development Cycles

Businesses often have a biased response from the development and operations teams, and therefore it is often difficult to tell if the application is operational. When development teams submit a request, the development cycle times are unnecessarily extended. Traditional businesses take from 3 to 6 months to release a product. But with DevOps engineer skills, the same cycle can be reduced into a daily or even hourly release-build cycle. Hence, continuous development and deployment build a significant competitive advantage for businesses.

The advantage with DevOps developers is that with joint development and operations efforts, the team’s applications are ready to use more quickly. The ability to innovate faster than its competitors is one of the foremost reasons for the success of a business.

“Companies that successfully adopt  DevOps technology will benefit from agile teams that collaborate more seamlessly and are able to maximize results. These integrated teams can work towards the same goals, and in turn, focus on the right measurements to increase the quality of the digital services.”

2. DevOps Engineers ensures better implementation

Programming defects cause implementation failure in businesses. With shorter development cycles, DevOps roles and responsibilities promote frequent code versions which make it easy to detect code defects. Hence, time can be used to reduce implementation failures using agile programming principles. Recovery time is also an important issue because at times there are some failures. With DevOps tools, this recovery is much faster as development teams and operations work together to share ideas and take into account the challenges of both teams during development.

DevOps engineers run virtualized infrastructures, they can be provisioned, run, and shut down in a matter of seconds, with the costs that are literally close to none, as compared to lengthy manual configuration. DevOps means that you do not have to use a development environment, a different testing environment, and a third implementation. Hence, DevOps engineers ensure better implementation with a collaborative approach.

3. DevOps Engineers make Communication and Collaboration easy

It is well known that a business grows better when teams work collaboratively and there isn’t any scope of miscommunication. The increased communication and collaboration between development and operations teams means that they’re no longer siloed and can communicate with one another freely, sharing knowledge and best practices to build a robust process.

Recommended Reading: Top 10 DevOps Engineers around the World

DevOps professionals are happier and more productive because of effective communication and collaboration. When different teams trust each other, they can experiment and innovate more effectively with more resources. The DevOps culture is of trust between team members and risk-sharing. DevOps eliminates the process of “passing” the application to the processes and waiting to see what is happening. The process becomes transparent as all individuals work towards a common goal.

DevOps is a programming principle that is an excellent execution of collaboration between development and operations teams, it directly translates into shorter development cycles time, increasing the frequency of releasing code into production. DevOps culture is built on the pillars of communication and collaboration, so each member of the team has their say in the process of software delivery. Instead of finding who to blame, the DevOps team achieved new heights together.

4. DevOps Engineers offer Greater Competencies

In today’s competitive environment, the speed of deployment makes it easier to work with and it also gets changes out to the market sooner. It’s necessary to get things into the market as quickly as possible, without neglecting quality or security. This is when the need for DevOps developers for businesses comes into the picture.

There are ways to automate DevOps tasks. The continuous integration servers automate the code testing process and reduce the amount of manual work required. Acceleration tools can be used to compile code faster and accurately. The scalable infrastructure, such as cloud-based platforms, increases the team’s access to hardware resources.

Businesses need to remain competitive in today’s business world. Introducing DevOps technology is one way to achieve this as it allows businesses to increase the heartbeat of deployment and put more rigor into testing. As a result, testing and deployment are accelerated. This way, DevOps engineers offer greater competencies.

5. DevOps Engineers Help Save Time and Money

DevOps engineers save time and money by implementing DevOps tools of IaC, CI, and CD to ensure the uniformity of task scenarios and infrastructure immutability, so automation becomes 100% efficient. This helps greatly in reducing the amount of time and effort spent on routine and repetitive tasks.

Hiring DevOps engineers translate into reduced general costs and requirements of IT staff. In a DevOps environment, automation saves a lot of time and effort. Teams share codebases and take advantage of automatic deploys to expose problems early on in the development process. That just can’t happen in traditional organizations where there aren’t any DevOps professionals. DevOps brings plenty of tangible benefits to businesses. In the State of DevOps Report, Puppet revealed that businesses value from DevOps engineers due to:

• 200x more frequent deploys
• 24x faster recovery times
• 3x lower change failure rates

“DevOps is as much a way of working than anything else, and its introduction can help organizations innovate and speed time to market, and without it, organizations have to function with disparate systems, including both a development environment and a test environment as well as a separate operations department.”

– Patrick Callaghan, enterprise architect, strategic business advisor at DataStax.

Role of DevOps Engineer in various Industries

DevOps tools can be applied in various industries and provide great results for any business, large and small. Below we list full stack DevOps benefits for travel, eCommerce, insurance, finances, and healthcare, to name a few.

• Travel Companies

DevOps tools build efficient technological solutions in no time and optimize their workflows to deliver value to their customers. Adopting DevOps tools quickly provides a competitive edge needed to secure the business in its market segment.

• eCommerce Companies

eCommerce companies operate online and have to remain competitive. They need to store and process huge volumes of data, maintain database integrity and security, provide personalization to their customers, etc. DevOps engineers offer a smooth, automated, cost-efficient, and reliable performance of the system. DevOps is going to be an ace in the eCommerce industry.

• Insurance companies

Insurance companies have to deal with lots of industry-specific challenges, like hard competition due to comparison shopping, new heights of technology utilization set by industry-leading companies. Implementing DevOps technology, its workflows, and CI/CD pipelines can solve all of these issues quickly, and so DevOps engineers are important for Insurance companies as well.

• Healthcare Business

Modern healthcare businesses’ basic IT operations include easy app scalability, high service availability, 100% system security, cross-platform accessibility, and fast feature delivery. All of these can be achieved using DevOps business metrics of software development and IT operations.

• Financial Companies

The reason many financial companies implement DevOps practices to software development and operations is that it helps in the great transition from legacy systems to the private cloud clusters. Due to the ability to weave regulatory requirements into Infrastructure as Code, DevOps engineers are excelling in Financial institutions. When there is little room for human error and close to zero time is wasted on virtual server configuration, code development, and release lifecycle become much more coherent and predictable. And DevOps engineers provide better predictability of the release lifecycle.

In conclusion, implementing DevOps technologies helps businesses grow exponentially by saving time and money, increasing software lifecycle predictability, building a corporate culture around innovation, and keeping the team spirit high. We will highlight it in the details below.

Based on our experience obtained after working for 6 years in the IT industry, businesses from various industries have a variety of problems with IT operations. The new and trending discipline of DevOps addresses them all. Therefore, if you are in need of DevOps engineers, we at EngineerBabu will be extremely happy to help you achieve your goals. You can hire expert DevOps engineers from EngineerBabu and grow your business.

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The success of DevOps creates intense competition for hiring DevOps engineers among companies. You might be wondering what makes DevOps engineers so special, what do they actually do, what are DevOps engineer roles and responsibilities, why do you need them, where can you find them and what should you be looking for when hiring DevOps Engineers.

This blog will hopefully demystify some of those points for you. Let’s see which are the 10 points to keep in mind while hiring DevOps engineers:

1. Fundamental Development and Operation Skills

‘DevOps’ which originated as a combined expression of ‘software DEVelopment’ and ‘information technology OPerationS’, describes a methodology and supporting tools (DevOps Tools) that invite active and continuous collaboration between software developers and an overall cost of IT operations professionals such as DBAs, network administrators, security specialists, and system programmers.

Apart from having a burning passion for scripting and coding, DevOps engineers must be flexible and collaborative to engage with the entire team to carry out the process of development and operations successfully.

When narrowing down the possible options for hiring DevOps engineers, it’s useful to start with the broad range of core fundamentals that every DevOps engineer should have in their repertoire:

• Virtualization Expertise
• Comprehensive System build
• Scripting and coding skills
• Substantial IT Knowledge
• Continuous delivery or integration

2. Automation Expertise

It is one of the responsibilities of a DevOps engineer to ensure automation at every level of the project possible. Debugging every little code is tiring, therefore Automation counts as a core DevOps engineer skill to save time in solving technical problems at the micro-level. Automation is one of the key DevOps engineer skills.

For hiring DevOps engineers, it is important to find out how much your candidate is skillful in solving business and technical problems by automating stuff. The ability to continuously develop and integrate new systems and operations into the code is a key skill to be checked while hiring DevOps engineers.

Achieving continuous delivery is one of the foremost DevOps engineer roles and responsibilities. A good DevOps engineer can compare and contrast automation tools and knows the difference between Unit, Acceptance and Integration tests, and has experience in each. They will also clearly be able to explain why testing is so important.

Recommended Reading: Top 10 DevOps Engineers around the World

The real power of a DevOps developer is in his/her skills with automation tools. Basically, DevOps engineers need to have an intimate knowledge of Chef and Puppet, the two most popular configuration management systems.

At the time of hiring DevOps engineers, ask your candidate about their favorite scripts they’re particularly proud of and whether they’re able to branch code, write code, test code, commit code and deploy code across two dozen servers without blinking an eye. If one can do this, he’s the one.

3. Flexible Learner

In the field of ever-changing technologies, everyday something new is coming up and to pace with the upcoming technologies, one needs to be kept updated. Therefore, a DevOps engineer needs to be a quick learner.

A good DevOps engineer is the one who has the capacity to learn new technologies, someone who never stops learning and keeps on updating his knowledge base and skill set with the market trends. DevOps, agile, lean, Kanban are sets of behavioral and cultural skills and checklists.

DevOps focuses on modernizing teams before technologies. They should be flexible enough to move from one area of software construction to another, be it integration, testing, releasing or deployment. A DevOps engineer must have flexible working skills and adapt to the changing code, technologies and the client’s needs.

DevOps isn’t just about introducing your organization or project to the benefits of Lean/Agile, rather, it’s also about encouraging your team to self-improvement and by learning new things and hence empowering them towards the process development by means of visualization, iteration and enabling continuous feedback.

A Cross-Functional attitude for a DevOps engineer is considered ideal. Some DevOps engineers come from system administration, others come from development teams, but the ideal DevOps engineer comes from both ops and dev teams and can speak the language of each team. Hence, an ideal DevOps engineer is the one who adapts with learning new technologies on the fly.

4. Right Vision and Attitude

It is of utmost importance for a DevOps engineer to articulate your product or project vision. Working under the umbrella of a shared vision protects from the later pains. It’s important for organizations to define their vision clearly to the prospects and hire the one who shares that vision.

When one believes in something, he/she will push his/her limits to get it done but when they lack that vision, they would not. A DevOps engineer should have a sense of freedom in his attitude. Writing beautiful code is an art and it needs freedom.

Art isn’t born under pressure. DevOps engineers must possess the skills to seek freedom from superiors and to grant freedom to juniors. They should employ a “work smarter, not harder” attitude within their work—focused on maximizing efficiency.

A DevOps engineer should share their ideas but when it comes down to meeting the customer’s request, even if it’s doing the work differently – they’ll do the job. Most DevOps minded people are extremely intelligent which probably plays into their stubbornness when it comes to following the plan.

An ideal DevOps engineer is the one who shares his ideas and even tries to convince the clients if it’s really better for their business. But if the customer doesn’t understand, then just flows with the plan. So when you’re looking for the ideal DevOps engineer to hire on your team, you want the best person to do the work in an innovative but flexible manner. Pick the candidate who can do the adjacent possible if his exact idea isn’t approved by the customer or isn’t feasible monetarily.

5. Scripting Skills

High-quality scripting skills is a basic skill for a DevOps engineer. Whether it’s JavaScript, Python, Perl, or Ruby, a successful DevOps engineer must be able to write code. He should know that the language depends entirely on the context of the project and the DevOps tools needed.

From writing manual code to replacing manual processes such as assigning IP addresses or DNS codes, there must be someone with the ability to write them and that’s what the perfect candidate should be able to do. He should understand the difference between development paradigms such as procedural, object-oriented, or functional programming.

A perfect DevOps engineer is the one who understands and knows complete DevOps technologies. Without the ability to understand infrastructure it could prove somewhat difficult to be the full package DevOps developer. When it comes to scripting languages, the simpler is the better. Many DevOps engineers will have used a fair few languages and have strong knowledge of one or two in their repertoire. The language itself though isn’t so much important as the ability to be able to read design patterns.

Recommended Reading: 10 Essential Tips for Hiring Top Remote Employees

Incorporating infrastructure skills will enable an effective DevOps engineer to design and deploy applications effectively using the best of the best platforms.

Scripting is just one of the key DevOps engineer skills a developer should have, just ahead of cloud and infrastructure experience. DevOps engineers should have a working understanding of data center-based and cloud infrastructure components. This includes elements such as how software is networked to running virtual networks.

6. Soft Skills

Soft skills are as important in the skillset of a DevOps engineer as scripting skills. A DevOps engineer should be able to communicate and interact well with the team, be service-oriented, and care about the ultimate end value of the project. A proactive engineer with no oversight is always preferred.

A DevOps engineer is no one-man job, so in that case, any future employee must have soft skills along with technical skills. When developers communicate with each other effectively, applications can be delivered in a much shorter period of time than if some of them are not communicated well.

As it is popularly said, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Effective communication ensures that complete information is conveyed to each of the team members. Having good communication leads to fewer errors and therefore lower costs and improves the quality of code.

Strong interpersonal communication skills enable them to work with teammates across various roles to remove obstacles as they arise. It’s often up to the DevOps team to create communication strategies that keep everyone on the same page.

7. Decision Maker and Problem Solver

DevOps professionals are faced to manage emergencies and blackouts. They are expected to act as firefighters. These special cases require a good understanding of IT processes, good technical knowledge, and proven experience. Ask about incident management and postmortems. Along with virtualization experience, they must be efficient decision-makers and problem solvers.

Today, companies need people who can design a solution that scales and performs with high availability and uptime. DevOps engineers should be strategically minded, they must make decisions consistently that consider both long and short-term needs.

Applicants also need to understand fault tolerance and failure domains so they are not putting all the eggs in one basket. DevOps engineers must provide a clear understanding of the differences and subtleties between each of the management techniques.

A DevOps engineer should be a confident leader who can influence and motivate future team members who are new to DevOps technologies. He should know to encounter and overcome strong-willed individuals who were set against change and adopting DevOps tools and principles. They should have an Eager sense of curiosity, with strong problem-solving skills and investigative drive.

8. Global Networks

Larger companies resort to global talent searches when they are hiring DevOps engineers. So extra costs like relocation for new hires are taken in stride. Unfortunately, relocation is often discouraged in more budget-conscious mid-sized and small companies. In such cases, hiring a remote DevOps engineer is the perfect choice for you.

Recruiting isn’t going to get easier any time soon, but successful hiring is vital to company growth. By networking globally and focusing on the right skill set, offering a culture of engagement, and focusing on what your company can do for the right person, you’ll be well-positioned for success in your recruiting process.

To succeed in hiring DevOps engineers, hiring managers should do everything they can to grow their networks at a global level. It includes going to meet-ups, developers’ meet, making connections on LinkedIn, joining communities like Github, Hackernoon, etc. A culture of engagement is a key component of hiring DevOps engineers.

9. Security Skills

The term DevOps has only really grown to prominence in the past few years because of its association with the ‘Agile’ methodology of software development. Security skills are one of the main DevOps engineers’ skills.

It is paramount to build-in secure software from the start of deployment, as opposed to adding it in later. Secure software is what everyone seeks. If security is not in place from the outset then there is more chance that hackers could write in damaging code to the network.

Therefore, while hiring DevOps engineers, ensuring security is on the top of the list of skills. Your checklist should include the following points:

• He/She should have a level of understanding equivalent to a CCNA/CCNP; meaning s/he knows the protocols in depth.
• Should have initiated the uses of visualization/project management tools to improve workflow visualization such as Trello, Asana, etc.
• Comprehends the common port assignments.
• Knowledge of 7 layers of the OSI model.
• They can outline protocol sequences of procedures like DNS or the TCP 3 way handshake.

It basically means Developers who know how to properly deploy and deploy their code, and/or SysAdmins who know how to dive into the code and fix things when shit goes pear-shaped. Either way, they’re highly desirable for obvious reasons – it’s a real sweet-spot hire for any company, as it means faster shipping of production code.

10. Hire through a DevOps Consultant

This is a way out to save your time and energy in hiring the right DevOps engineer for your project. Independent DevOps consultants command big dollars, but there are also many who would prefer a steady IT gig with a company instead of constantly having to market their wares.

There is nothing easy about finding a DevOps engineer when so many other companies are looking for the same person. You will have to invest top dollar for top talent in the process and should be patient as it might take several months to bring the right person on board.

At the same time, however, companies can also take steps to ensure that the net which they use to catch up on the DevOps talents is deep enough to gather more and more talents from around the world. The cast for these valuable positions is as broad as possible.

‘Technavio’, a market research firm, has predicted that the worldwide DevOps market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19 percent through 2020. Hence, it’s the time for hiring managers to get ready with their binoculars to find the best of the DevOps talent for their companies.

DevOps engineers are hard to find, so it might be worthwhile to go with a professional IT company to help you find one. If you are considering using a professional IT agency for hiring DevOps engineer, then EngineerBabu is a suitable choice for you. Hiring DevOps engineers from EngineerBabu will save your time in filtering the ones with the right tech and non-tech skills as we have already done that for you.

Also Read:

• How to Hire Remote Software Engineers with EngineerBabu?
• Data Scientist vs Data Engineer – How to Hire them Remotely?
• Best Way To Hire A PHP Developer
• Best Way To Hire Node JS Developer

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