10 DevOps engineer skills to add to your resume

The DevOps engineer role today

The term DevOps combines development and operations, two enterprise job types that were traditionally isolated from each other. The teams performing these siloed activities often experienced poor communication and collaboration, which delayed efficient deployment, complicated effective workload management and delayed further software refinement.

As software development and deployment demands accelerated, DevOps paradigms emerged to break down silos and streamline the software lifecycle into shorter, more iterative and better-integrated practices.

These fundamentals have changed little since DevOps was first coined around 2009, but changing demands have expanded and diversified the role. In its early days, DevOps was simply intended to break down silos between development and operations.

Today, the discipline has become an efficient and highly sophisticated approach to automating, streamlining and accelerating the entire software lifecycle. This is accomplished with strong continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, using infrastructure as code (IaC), the broad adoption of cloud computing and virtual containers, the use of meaningful metrics and the advancing importance of security and AI in the software development process.

Furthermore, the integration of development and operations has expanded into other areas of specialization today. Consider the following examples:

• MLOps. Specializes in the development of machine learning software and its collaboration with operations.
• DevSecOps. Emphasizes security in software development and deployment.
• Automation engineering. Uses DevOps practices to design, build and manage automation platforms for business workflows, processes and tasks.
• Site reliability engineers. Blends software development and operations to create and maintain stable (reliable) and efficient software systems for the business.

What does a DevOps engineer do?

Current DevOps engineer job listings encompass a diverse set of responsibilities, including programming and software development, local and remote deployment infrastructures, project management and business skills.

Software development skills

• Understanding project performance and operational requirements.
• Writing, reviewing and validating software code.
• Testing, verifying and fixing bugs.
• Managing CI/CD tools and pipelines.
• Performing workload monitoring and logging.
• Performing root cause analysis, troubleshooting and incident management.

Infrastructure skills

• Implementing and maintaining automation and scripting mechanisms, such as IaC.
• Deploying workloads in VMs and virtual containers.
• Managing workload configurations, setups and integrations.
• Managing and optimizing local and cloud computing infrastructures.
• Developing and enforcing security measures through vulnerability assessment and risk management practices.

Project management and business skills

• Planning team structures, roles and responsibilities.
• Defining development and deployment workflows or processes.
• Monitoring UX metrics and KPIs.
• Overseeing software project lifecycles.
• Managing internal and external stakeholders.
• Handling communication with the team, stakeholders and customers.
• Mentoring and collaborating with team members.
• Managing project progress reports.

Who can become a DevOps engineer?

Any technical professional with the appropriate set of skills and training can successfully become a DevOps engineer. The diverse requirements and extensive scope of DevOps roles can suit individuals from both an infrastructure and software development background. A typical set of DevOps engineer requirements can include the following:

• A bachelor's degree or higher in software engineering, software design -- such as architecture -- computer science or IT.
• Individuals without a formal degree, and even those seeking more education, can approach a DevOps role with relevant work experience, as well as successful completion of DevOps training programs, such as certifications and boot camps.
• DevOps requires some amount of practical expertise, and professionals typically require two to three years or more as a software engineer, system administrator or similar role where practical skills can contribute to DevOps practices.
• A DevOps professional should have strong programming skills with proficiency in major automation languages, such as Ruby, Python or Bash. Proficiency in multiple languages is often preferred. However, it's more important to have the flexibility to adapt and learn new languages over time as business and project needs evolve.
• DevOps workflows are typically ongoing and use a rapid, highly iterative approach, so extensive experience with continuous development pipelines, such as CI/CD, is beneficial.
• Virtualization skills are needed to package software builds and release builds to an infrastructure for testing, validation and production. Skills with VMs and virtual containers are commonplace.
• Orchestration and automation skills are vital to create the scripts and workflows needed to provision, configure and deploy code. Experience with IaC practices is beneficial -- especially when combined with automation and strong version control techniques.
• Code must be deployed to an infrastructure, so DevOps experts must have thorough knowledge of local (on-premises) and public cloud computing infrastructures to deploy, monitor and optimize the software workload over time.

How to become a DevOps engineer

There is no single uniform path to becoming a DevOps engineer. The skills and experience of DevOps practitioners can be as varied as the individual roles. But those seeking a DevOps career can often start with these seven steps:

1. Review DevOps skill and background requirements. Consider the sections above for a general description of DevOps roles and spend time reviewing a wide variety of actual job postings to form a picture of the requirements for any roles of interest.
2. Evaluate current skills and experience. With a clear picture of the requirements in mind, carefully evaluate your current skills and experience to see how closely they align with the roles of interest. It's likely that some new skills and additional practical experience will be required to assemble an attractive and comprehensive resume.
3. Study key aspects of DevOps roles. DevOps focuses on programming and infrastructure, so ensure that there is ample expertise in both. This might require learning or developing skills in important languages, as well as gaining expertise in computing elements, such as provisioning and utilizing cloud computing resources.
4. Develop practical experience through work involvement. Those seeking a DevOps role are likely already involved in software development and IT at some level. This can often provide opportunities to become involved with DevOps projects where exposure to relevant tools and practices can quickly come into focus. Team members can also be important sources for mentoring and guidance.
5. Seek DevOps certifications. With some expertise in hand, consider pursuing a DevOps certification that can help to meet job requirements and demonstrate competence. Common certifications include AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert credentials.
6. Build a resume. It takes time to become a DevOps engineer, but those seeking this role can use the evolving base of education and experience to build a resume of successful DevOps projects and team involvement that will showcase skills and abilities.
7. Stay abreast of new technologies. New tools and technologies, such as AI, are always evolving, which can affect DevOps practices. Take advantage of opportunities to learn and bring new DevOps insights to working teams.

10 DevOps engineer skills to boost your resume

The list of requisite DevOps engineer skills is extensive, and even more are necessary to master the role. Although specific requirements vary between organizations, here's a closer look at 10 common skill areas -- ranging from highly technical abilities to soft people skills -- that employers routinely look for in a DevOps engineer.

1. Platform familiarity

IT is typically built around the idea of a stack -- the combination of prevailing OSes, services and associated tool sets to develop, deploy and support applications. Successful DevOps engineers have deep system administrator-level expertise in managing the stack that the business currently uses or plans to use.

The three principal stacks are Microsoft Windows Server, Linux server distributions and a cloud structure. For example, DevOps engineers are often required to implement, install, manage, upgrade, and troubleshoot the configuration and maintenance of Linux or Windows application servers within an application environment. Similarly, a prospective employer might seek five or more years of experience with Unix, Linux or Red Hat and their command-line shells, as well as expertise with the installation and management of software on those OSes.

The Microsoft stack typically includes OSes such as Windows Server 2022 and Windows Server 2025; management platforms such as System Center and its various iterations, including Operations Manager for system- and service-level monitoring and notifications; and supporting applications, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL or Mongo for a database or SharePoint and Teams for collaboration. There are also numerous tools to develop, test and deploy code, as well as configure and manage existing infrastructure that hosts deployments.

A Linux stack is based on the open source OS kernel and can involve several common Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. It also includes many other open source tools, such as Ansible, Chef and Puppet, as well as open source frameworks -- OpenStack, OpenNebula and Apache CloudStack -- that support private cloud creation.

Strong knowledge of VM platforms, such as VMware's vSphere or Linux KVM, as well as container platforms such as Docker, OpenVZ and Cloud Foundry, is also vital. Open source stacks have gained attention in recent years as the number of VMs and containers proliferates.

Public cloud options include Microsoft Azure -- which can complement Microsoft stacks -- as well as Google Compute Platform and AWS, which can complement Linux stacks. Public or hybrid cloud infrastructure requires knowledge of the chosen cloud services, management options and cost structure. It's not necessary for a DevOps engineer to be familiar with all three major cloud providers, but being proficient with the employer's preferred public cloud is a significant advantage in a job search.

2. Programming and scripting languages

DevOps practices involve getting code through development and into production quickly. Although writing low-level code is usually left to development teams, DevOps engineers need to understand the source code, develop automation scripts for package assembly and deployment, and tackle integrations -- such as getting the code version to communicate with the MySQL database -- to run deployments on the operations side.

DevOps engineer skills should include several years of close experience with PowerShell, PHP, Bash, Python, Perl, Ruby and other programming languages, such as Java, Go, and C++. DevOps engineers also benefit from a background in build and release tools, such as Ant, AWS, Azure Stack Hub, Bamboo, Chef, CruiseControl, Docker, Fisheye, Gradle, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Make, Maven, Puppet, Rally, Remedy, Tekton and Vagrant.

3. Configuration management, version management and IaC

Speed and fluidity are the hallmarks of DevOps. Code is always changing, and a new day can bring a new commit, build and release. This requires sound collaboration and version management skills to assess ever-changing user requirements, assemble the correct software components and dependencies, and craft a software release that runs properly on the desired infrastructure, whether local or cloud-based.

DevOps engineers work with tools such as Git, GitHub, Perforce and Apache Subversion for repository control. To better deploy ever-changing code, many DevOps engineers embrace configuration management, which is often automated to provision resources securely and consistently and accelerate the pace of version releases. Tools such as Puppet, Chef and Vagrant provide these capabilities, as do cloud providers' native tools, such as AWS CodePipeline or CodeDeploy.

DevOps engineers also use IaC to programmatically create infrastructure from code, such as scripts -- not through traditional manual processes. This approach uses automation to create and manage resources, making the provisioning and deployment process faster, more consistent and less prone to human error. Code can be versioned, reused and shared just like any other software. Typical tools for IaC include AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef Software, Puppet, SaltStack and Terraform.

4. Provisioning and deployment

DevOps engineers don't just shepherd code through development; they also provide the bridge needed to facilitate those releases on the operations side. This requires skills in the realm of IT hardware and infrastructure, from servers and storage to networks and OSes.

Because DevOps engineers are familiar with the entire IT stack, they can guide the provisioning and deployment of each release in the local data center or, more commonly, in the public cloud. This typically involves creating and maintaining reliable and highly available services, such as resilient or redundant cloud infrastructures.

The need for operations-side skills is increasing. In DevOps, project teams have autonomy over the development and deployment of business applications. As deployment targets evolve and proliferate to include hybrid and multi-cloud environments, DevOps capabilities must fold these additional environments into their deployment portfolio.

Because DevOps is responsible for deploying a large portion of applications, there is also a bigger need to monitor and manage application health, performance and availability over time. Typical tools for provisioning and deployment include Ansible, Terraform, Pulumi and cloud provider services such as AWS CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager.

5. Security

DevOps engineers play an increasingly crucial role in enterprise security, spanning both development and operations. On the development side, DevOps teams must create secure code, establish strong authentication and well-defined guardrails for accessing and using sensitive business data, evaluate potential security risks in open source software, perform vulnerability testing in the CI/CD pipeline and more.

The need for security in software development is even more pronounced today, with increasing regulatory demands and new ML models and AI platforms interacting with ever more infrastructure and data stores.

On the operations side, a DevOps engineer must implement security practices such as using VPNs, virtual private clouds (VPCs) and strong encryption for data that can be both at rest and in transit. DevOps security responsibility increasingly overlaps with more formal security tasks, such as managing antimalware and intrusion protection platforms. It's common for DevOps teams to include cybersecurity team members; this can sometimes extend the DevOps paradigm to DevSecOps.

6. Tracking and assessing release performance

A DevOps engineer is the ultimate consultant -- someone who can objectively evaluate the performance of releases, make required adjustments and optimizations to provisioned resources and platforms and use various tools to measure workload performance. Changes in performance over time can readily justify resource scaling or serve as baselines for automated scaling. Falling availability (greater downtime) might require redundant infrastructure techniques. And a critical loss of workload availability or health can trigger an emergency troubleshooting response from the DevOps engineering team.

In addition, DevOps engineers must analyze log results, derive relevant KPIs and then share that content with the entire staff and project stakeholders to enhance future software iterations. Tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, Sensu, Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk and New Relic can monitor application performance locally and on public cloud platforms. Other tools and platforms include Datadog, AppDynamics, Stackify, SolarWinds and Dynatrace.

Performance management can also extend to issue tracking and help desk support to prioritize tickets and investigate complex problems. Workload performance management encompasses monitoring and logging tools, such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus and Splunk, to capture metrics and logs for thorough analysis. With the growth of big data analytics and AI-based systems, performance management is increasingly employing analytics and AI tools to identify complex application problems, perform predictive analytics and look for future trends in application behavior. DevOps teams might opt to collaborate with data science and analytical teams to support such efforts rather than attempting to master those additional big data skills as a DevOps function.

7. Network optimization

Modern enterprise workloads rely on network resources and security. Almost all enterprise workloads employ a network-focused client-server architecture. But even web portals and other applications are accessed through a network. If the network is disrupted, so is the workload. This makes networks a central part of any DevOps workload configuration, deployment and ongoing management process.

Consequently, DevOps engineer skills should include extensive knowledge of network architectures, protocols and interfaces, as well as an understanding of workload bandwidth and latency requirements. Network knowledge also involves a strong emphasis on security, including the deployment and management of VPNs, VPCs and the use of software-defined networking for container-centric tasks, such as microsegmentation to implement logical subnets and network organization.

8. Troubleshooting

DevOps engineers are routinely involved in everyday operations. It's common to expect high-level professionals to provide substantial problem-solving support for help desk and other staff, especially in relation to specific DevOps workloads within the deployment pipeline. This can include remote deployment and support tasks, such as deploying, managing and troubleshooting workloads that run at remote or hosted locations. Troubleshooting can also extend to more traditional parts of business infrastructure, such as the remediation of server, storage and network issues.

Consequently, DevOps engineers must be expert troubleshooters and consultants who can receive alerts, evaluate metrics, run tests on the infrastructure and take immediate action to remediate issues and restore workload health, availability and performance. There is little formal education to support such a broad mandate, so direct troubleshooting experience will be a key part of any DevOps practitioner's resume.

9. Integration

Building modern software platforms is sometimes more about integrating varied platforms and services than writing low-level code. For example, nobody creates messaging or database functionality today. The code integrates with existing platforms, such as Microsoft Exchange, Redis, database systems or countless other third-party or open source business applications that use common APIs -- or even creates new custom APIs to handle required integration tasks.

This assortment of platforms is typically part of the business stack, but DevOps engineers should be familiar with how to use them. For example, if the business ties a software product to an SQL database back end, a DevOps engineer should have the skills to set up the database and make complex SQL queries. The goal for DevOps engineers is to establish a holistic view of enterprise-wide resources and services, understand dependencies and get those assets to interoperate successfully. This can be a particularly difficult goal in complex modern enterprise environments.

10. Communication and team management

DevOps engineer skills are not just technical. Someone in this role must possess strong soft skills and be an expert communicator, a clear and supportive mentor and a capable manager -- one who can bring different professionals together in a productive manner to ensure rapid, continuous development that achieves the best business results.

With so many people and competing interests involved in the DevOps process, technical and professional problems will inevitably arise over time. These include interpersonal conflicts, changes in roles and responsibilities within the organization and broken business processes. A DevOps engineer must assess these situations and seek constructive solutions that will achieve goals while keeping constituents happy. For example, if a release cycle is delayed by inefficient manual steps, a DevOps engineer can make a technical and business case to invest in automation.

Important DevOps tools to learn

Most practical DevOps skills and activities will require the use of software tools to support software development, deployment and management throughout the software lifecycle. These tools are collectively referred to as a toolchain or tool set and can vary widely among individual organizations or DevOps teams. A central part of any DevOps role might require working familiarity with major tools across the toolchain. Here are some common examples of DevOps tools:

• CI/CD tools. DevOps practices follow a continuous and iterative paradigm of designing, building, testing, deploying and monitoring. DevOps practitioners will typically rely on CI/CD tools to execute, manage and automate this iterative software development flow. CI/CD tools include Bamboo, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD and Jenkins.
• Configuration tools. Software and hardware must be properly configured for seamless deployments onto the proper infrastructure. Configuration tools automate and manage the configuration environment for stable, consistent and secure provisioning and deployment. Popular configuration management tools include Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Salt.
• IaC tools. The IaC deployment methodology creates unique and definitive releases for deployment that are replaced rather than updated, unlike traditional software. It uses a declarative language to formulate a suitable release package and deployment environment. Common IaC tools include Terraform and OpenTofu, as well as cloud-native tools such as AWS CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager.
• Monitoring tools. Metrics and KPIs can help ensure the health, availability and performance of DevOps workloads. Monitoring tools can offer early warnings of performance impairments, the need to scale resources to maintain workload performance or disruptions in workload operation. Common monitoring and logging tools include Datadog, Nagios, Prometheus, Splunk and Zabbix.
• Orchestration and containers. Although conventional virtualization and VMs remain useful, DevOps typically relies on containers to support advanced and flexible software architectures, such as microservices. This requires knowledge of container engines, such as Docker or Kaniko, along with orchestration platforms like Kubernetes to tie the containers together.
• Project management tools. DevOps projects can be complex and involve a multitude of components in active development. This often requires the use of project planning and management tools to track project status, team assignments and other issues. Common planning and project management tools include Asana, Jira and Trello.
• Version control tools. DevOps software development workflows are fast, short and highly iterative. Final builds can involve numerous individual components. Careful code repository and version control -- using tools such as BitBucket, Git and GitHub -- help organize builds and versions.

Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.