Must Have Skills to Be an AWS DevOps Engineer
AWS DevOps is quickly becoming one of the most trending domains that many professionals are getting interested in. Read this blog to get a better understanding to help you get started with the most important skills to become an AWS DevOps Engineer.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the combination of the term “Development” and “Operations”. DevOps is the set of practices conceived to speed up software development and operations lifecycle. Traditionally, every software was developed by the development team and maintained by the operations team separately. The two teams don’t have proper communication, which will delay the development process, and the end product will contain many bugs.
DevOps helps organizations bring the development and the operations teams together for a faster, accurate, error-free, reliable, and secure application lifecycle experience. If you want to acquire certification in DevOps, check out this DevOps Certification Training Course. This dedicated training will help you develop skills through structured content designed by industry experts.
What is AWS?
AWS or Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular Cloud Computing service providers in the global market today. AWS leads the race from its competitors like Azure from Microsoft, GCP from Google, IBM’s cloud, etc. Cloud Computing has revolutionized the entire IT industry by offering key services and capabilities (in the form of computing capacity, security, databases, etc.) that will help you accelerate your business in a totally new way.
So now we understand what AWS and DevOps are, now let’s understand what AWS DevOps is, and then learn the most important skills that will help you become an AWS DevOps Engineer.
What is AWS DevOps?
AWS DevOps is Amazon’s way of implementing DevOps with AWS’s capability. This intersection of technologies helps companies build rapidly and deliver products using the industry best practices. These industry best practices help companies simplify provisioning, manage infrastructure, deploy application code, automate software release processes, and monitor app and infrastructure performance.
With AWS DevOps capabilities, the development team is able to implement CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery). While the operations team is able to securely store and version control source code, build, test, and deploy apps on cloud or on-premise.
Most Important Skills Required to Become AWS DevOps Engineer
Now we understood what AWS DevOps is, let’s dive right into the most important skills required to become an AWS DevOps Engineer:
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Cloud
Being an AWS DevOps Engineer, you are expected to be proficient in all of the AWS services, tools, and best practices that need to be followed. You must have an all-around knowledge and experience in AWS to be able to recommend the best services to product development teams that suit their requirements. You must also possess adequate information on the limitations of various AWS services and even their alternate solutions (non-AWS) that will better fit the specified requirements better.
You must be an expert in Cloud Computing skills to be able to architect cloud systems and ensure best practices are followed. You also need to validate the pros and cons of using IaaS, PaaS, or any other managed services while recommending or designing solutions.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
You must understand the concept of Continuous Delivery and learn real-world applications from it. Just knowing how to work with CD tools and the system isn’t sufficient, you must understand their architecture and how they work to be able to better integrate various systems and tools to create a fully functional delivery pipeline. You must be able to commit, merge, build, test, package, and deploy code. Tools side, you must be experienced with AWS CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline tools. Other than native AWS tools, it’s beneficial to be familiar with GitHub, Jenkins, etc.
IaC (Infrastructure as a Code)
Under AWS DevOps, the engineers are made to ensure that the systems built are in a repeatable format using various tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, AWS CDK, etc.
Configuration Management
If the infrastructure is built-in code then its configuration and setup must also be codified with the Configuration Management tool. These tools could be Chef, Ansible, Puppet, etc. It’s imperative that being an AWS DevOps Engineer you must possess configuration management skills.
Observability
It’s a crucial skill that will help you become an AWS DevOps Engineer. An AWS DevOps Engineer must ensure that the application and systems implement monitoring, alerting, and logging solutions. You will be relying on APM (Application Performance Monitoring) to understand critical insights into an app’s internal working. It also helps in making the debugging process easier. Gain deep knowledge in AWS native tools like Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Elasticsearch, etc. You will also be benefitted from knowing other tools like Nagios, Prometheus, etc.
Containers
Containerization technology is picking up speed lately, and many companies, businesses, and enterprises are completely shifting their deployment option to containers rather than still sticking to traditional deployment models of pushing apps to VMs. This means that an aspiring professional who wishes to become an AWS DevOps Engineer must become experienced in container tools like Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, etc.
Automation
Automation is core to the DevOps principle. Speed cannot be achieved without automating various aspects of DevOps. The DevOps philosophy deals with eliminating inefficiency within the process.
Troubleshoot and Resolve Issues
Troubleshooting and resolving issues is another skill that an AWS DevOps Engineer must possess. To be able to respond quickly you must have experience in troubleshooting operating systems like Ubuntu, Windows, Amazon LINUX, etc. To be able to automate various DevOps aspects you must possess working experience in scripting languages like Python, JavaScript, etc. Also be familiar with AWS Lambda, CloudWatch Events, SNS, etc.
Communication and Collaboration
It’s one of the most integral skills of DevOps and binds the DevOps principle. Since DevOps philosophy was formulated around communication and collaboration principles. It’s imperative that teams and team members communicate and collaborate to speed up the development process. These two skills proved essential in breaking barriers between IT teams and improving efficiency and effectiveness.
Conclusion
We have discussed the top-rated skills that you must possess to become an AWS DevOps Engineer.
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