DevOps administrator: The role and responsibilities

DevOps advocacy is often undervalued or overlooked entirely, but is arguably the most important role of a DevOps engineer. The shift to a DevOps culture can be disruptive and confusing to the engineering team members. As the DevOps subject matter expert, it falls to the DevOps engineer to help evangelize and educate the DevOps way across the organization. The DevOps engineer’s responsibilities how to become a devops engineer are multi-prong – they need to be agile enough to wear a technical hat and manage operations simultaneously. A drive for continuous improvement will be at the core of any efficient DevOps organization. Every person in a DevOps-centric organization should be highly focused on developing new features and services quickly without sacrificing reliability or customer experience.

A typical DevOps team structure may include a security professional, cloud architect, QA engineer, software developer, DevOps engineer, release coordinator, and other professionals. With continuous monitoring in DevOps, real-time feedback is provided on the current performance of the application in production. As DevOps facilitates faster development, QA must match its pace to run automated tests. Since QA is dependent on CI, continuous monitoring gets integrated as an important aspect of every state of the product life cycle. Moving your data and apps to the cloud can be a long and tedious process.

Download a Printable DevOps Roles and Responsibilities PDF

However, DevOps engineers rarely code from scratch or work directly on product code. Read on to learn who you need to hire and what you need to account for to create an efficient DevOps team. These roles were particularly important when software releases were more risky. However, these roles are less important (if not obsolete) with the use of strategies like automated testing and dark deployments. This is a DevOps expert who promotes and develops DevOps practices across the organization.

In DevOps, developers will also take on-call responsibilities in case of application/infrastructure emergencies. Effective collaboration should persist throughout software development and into incident response. A team that communicates effectively will proactively build better applications and infrastructure from the get-go – making rapid incident response even easier when it becomes necessary.

Related roles

The responsibility of deploying software either belongs to a specific engineer(s), or a team sets up continuous deployment to automate software releases. With CD, every code change passes through automated tests and deploys to production automatically. DevOps engineers will often be expected to have experience with one or more configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible. Many organizations have adopted these or similar tools to automate system administration tasks such as deploying new systems or applying security patches to systems already running.