In today’s tech world, IT professionals who know DevOps are in high demand. DevOps is a changing cultural practice that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) teams. DevOps authorizes faster, more reliable code development to production in an efficient and repetitive manner. Also, DevOps professionals are commanding higher salaries. Now, in this blog let us read more about DevOps and what DevOps skills to have.

DevOps Illustration

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a unification of software development and operations. This technology is the combination of practices, tools and cultural philosophies. It increases an organization’s ability to deliver services and applications through traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

This technology allows organizations to serve their customers better and be a better competitor in the market. Their teams use practices to automate processes which have been historically manual and slow. They use stack and tools which help them with operating and evolving applications fastly and reliably.

According to the StackOverflow Salary Calculator, the pay for a DevOps pro in San Francisco with a bachelor’s degree and 5 years of experience is $116,000. Whereas, a desktop developer with a similar background would make $10,000 less.

Top DevOps Skills To Have

So now, what exactly one needs to know to qualify for these higher salaries? Candidates with 5 key DevOps skills are getting better career opportunities:

Transformational Leadership

This transformational leadership approach needs a cultural transformation. To make a cultural change, one needs strong leadership. According to the 2017 State of DevOps Report, Puppet found that organizations with “transformational leadership” were twice as likely to be high performers like those without strong leaders.

Transformational leaders have 5 common characteristics to shape an organization’s culture and practices for better performance. These characteristics are majorly correlated with IT performance:

DevSecOps

Nowadays, there are so many new high-profile data breach cases coming up everyday on the news. Well known companies like Deloitte, Equifax, Sonic and Whole Foods are falling victims to these attacks. These high-profile cyber attacks have caused higher demand for security professionals.

The demand for security professionals is also altering jobs. Even though DevOps movement originally focused firstly on developers and IT operations staff, it has grown to surround security since then. The DevSecOps approach supports the idea that everyone is responsible for security.

Agile and Scrum Certifications

As per Robert Half, Agile and Scrum certifications are high in demand in North America as it comes in the technology skills and they play a crucial role in DevOps. The DevOps movement started as an attempt to put the principles of agile software development to IT operations. The Agile manifesto and principles emphasize communication, collaboration, combination, short development cycles and automation. Scrum is a famous version of agile development. Which presents small teams, short ‘sprints’ of development and 15 minute stand-up meetings to keep updates of the progress.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery (CD) is the method of using very short repetitions to develop or update software. Teams are using this approach oftenly to release updates daily or weekly. It was opposed to quarterly or yearly, as it was common with older approaches to development.

CD is a foundational piece of DevOps, and as per Puppet, it remarkably contributes to both lower deployment pain and higher IT performance.

Testing Automation

This is another key feature of DevOps. It is used for automation to reduce the number of tasks that workers must perform with one’s own hands. Because of its repetitive nature, testing is one of the effortless and most productive places in software development. According to the Puppet survey, it was found that high performers motorize remarkably more of their configuration management, testing, deployments and change approval processes. So basically, the result is more time for invention and a faster feedback cycle.

Final Words On Top 5 DevOps Skills

The rise in demand for these specialized DevOps skills with DevOps course online skyrockets, training in these areas can make one more important and valuable to employers. The goal of DevOps is to raise an organization’s speed when it comes to delivering applications and services. Having these top 5 DevOps skills will aid you in leading to higher salaries.

Also read this article: What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?