The DevOps

Career Guide

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The Outlook

Types of DevOps Organizations

DevOps in Start Ups vs. Enterprise Organizations

The Skillset

Interview Tips

Conclusion

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Introduction
No longer dismissed as merely a buzzword or
passing fad, DevOps has established itself as a
serious methodology for streamlining business
processes and improving software and IT service
delivery efficiencies. Firms across all industries-from software startups to banking institutions-have employed its tenets and practices to achieve
unprecedented levels of collaboration and
organizational improvement. This makes possessing
a DevOps skill set an increasingly critical prerequisite
for career-minded technologists.
Perhaps your organization is looking to make
a transition from traditional IT operations and
development practices to DevOps, or youre looking
to realign your career path with DevOps to position
yourself more favorably to future opportunities.
Whatever your motivations are, this ebook will
provide you with foundational knowledge for
boosting your career with DevOps.

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The Outlook
According to Gartner, by 2016 DevOps will be employed by 25 percent of global 2000 organizations. Its evolution
from a niche methodology to a mainstream strategy employed by organizations across the board makes competency
with its practices and toolset practically a must-have resume item. Of course, having it on your CV is only part of the
equation. As with any skill set, more practical experience and foundational knowledge serves to elevate you above
the competition, as well as make your on-the-job contributions more meaningful and of value.

Fortunately, the baseline skills of todays developers and admins share much in common with that of the DevOps
practitioner. But for those intent on supercharging their careers with DevOps, the rewards can be quite lucrative.
Jobsignal.io recently determined in its own research that DevOps is the highest compensated technology role
amongst all the different roles tracked, with the average salary for a DevOps-related role at an early stage startup
exceeding $110,000 in three months out a six month study between October 2014 and July 2015. In this timeframe,
DevOps professionals typically earned at least $10,000 more than a developer role.
And the outlook will keep getting brighter for DevOps practitioners-- at least in the near term, according to Jobsignal.
io. Startups of all stages and sizes are especially hungry for developers and operations folks with a knack for DevOps,
as they strive to achieve scalability and infrastructure return on investment.
Wondering where in the country DevOps skills will be best compensated? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the San Francisco
Bay Area leads in terms of DevOps job salaries. An abundance of bleeding edge startups coupled with the high cost
of living are some drivers for this high compensation, among others.
And compensation levels are impressive for DevOps jobs across the board location-wise, but especially in the
Bay Area: early stage startups pay upwards of $150,000, approximately $30,000 - $50,000 more than anywhere
elsewhere and $10,000 - $30,000 more than New York.

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Types of DevOps Organizations

DevOps may have its roots in the Agile/lean and
collaboration methodologies of startups, but again-the practices are being implemented at both startups
and established organizations across industries.
For example, Elon Musks high flying commercial
spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX uses DevOps, Agile,
and test-driven development approaches to make
its IT services more responsive to the changing
business of aerospace. This responsiveness is in fact
a requirement for all businesses in general today-because requirements change and business moves
so quickly across industries, an organization that
lags in delivery ends up deploying nothing--- since
the problem has likely changed once a solutions is
deployed.
This is the reason why DevOps has found its way into
industries outside of the typical software startup
such as energy and transportation companies.
In fact, DevOps are sometimes adopted easier
in industries you wouldnt think. In banking and
financial organizations, consequences of failure
are so high that developers tend to keep tight tabs
on deployment environments and infrastructure
requirements. The consequences of not maintaining
proper integrity through shorter feedback loops,
collaboration, and appropriate monitoring, among
others, can be devastating-- in Knight Capitals case,
$440 million up in smoke and its eventual demise.
Many traditional software companies are actually
to blame for practices such as throwing code over
the wall and siloing information through restrictive
processes and lack of communication.

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DevOps in Start-Ups v. Enterprise Organizations

Netflix, Facebook, Twitter. These names typically come
to mind when one thinks of the typical DevOps-enabled
organization, but firms such as the aforementioned
SpaceX and financial services powerhouse Capital One
have also embraced DevOps in their organizations.
When considering a DevOps career move, its perhaps
more useful to think about what size/stage company
one wishes to enter, as opposed to which industry. In
general, DevOps-enabled organizations can generally
be divided into two camps: startups and established
firms. And while DevOps can mean different things to
different organizations, early stage companies tend to
apply DevOps differently to their organizations than
established organizations.

they need layered security that devops practitioners

provide.
Regardless of whether your DevOps career brings
you to a startup or established enterprise, the same
underlying principles will be in play: collaboration,
information unsiloing, and shorter feedback loops,
among others. For practitioners, the appropriate
attitudes towards teamwork and communication
must be augmented by experience with the proper
toolset.

Early stage companies often require tight collaboration

and communication because of limited resources; a
developer and operations staff rolled into one exists
out of necessity. In order to take on larger, more
established players, firms need to become nimble
and hypercompetitive; by promoting fast failure and
frequent deployments, a DevOps startup can respond
faster to market demands than larger enterprise
competitors. Strappy Cloud/SaaS startups and new
social media companies were the first to employ socalled full stack developers: engineers with knowledge
and mastery of stages of software development that
are responsible for handling all facets of engineering,
front to back. Having this well-rounded skillset
dovetails directly into the DevOps ethos of information
desiloing and collaboration, as everyone (developers,
operations, IT staff, et al) can now speak the same
language.
In larger organizations, you can expect more
specialization to occur. Developers may be focused on
a subset of features, with groups like QA and security
dedicated to ensuring that the companys offering
meets quality and hardening standards, respectively.
In the case of the latter, especially, larger startups
and established firms may employ concepts like
secdevops or rugged ops to improve their security
measures. They may have deep pockets and invested
serious cash in the best security tools, but realize that

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The Skillset
Culture first, tools second. This is the order of precedent
that most DevOps practitioners encourage, albeit-the tools help to shape the culture. Because Agile and
lean are close cousins to DevOps, many of the highly
valued personality traits integral to them are also
highly valued to DevOps shops. Communication skills
and empathy are perhaps the two most important
skills-- this allows team members to be responsive to
the needs of the product offering, the customer, other
stakeholders-- and perhaps most importantly, other
team members. The best tooling in the world will not
go far without the proper cross-team communication
skills and collaboration strategies.
You may have heard of the DevOps toolchain-- the
superset of tools that support DevOps initiatives within
an organization. In general, these tools span several
disciplines-- from continuous integration/delivery
(CI/CD), automation and configuration management
(CM) to automated acceptance testing and system/
application monitoring. Increasingly, continuous
security monitoring and integrity validation solutions
also form part of the toolchain. For learn more about
the specific tools that comprise the DevOps toolchain,
check out our eBook The DevOps Toolchain.
A typical DevOps-enabled organization might expect
proficiency with CM tools like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible-as well as other automation and orchestration
platforms like Jenkins and Travis CI. As DevOps is
spiritually a grassroots movement, command of
popular open source tools is a highly prized skill set in
the DevOps arena. Containerization technologies such
as Docker and CoreOS Rocket are also essential tools
in the DevOps toolchain.

We find talent from a variety

of different backgrounds and
industries. Some of the talent
Im finding tends to be fresh
out of college. Theyve generally
been raised in this more agile
development environment; they
have a stronger orientation to
open source tools.
Ken Venner, CIO of SpaceX

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Interview Tips
Aside from the typical questions regarding technical
skills and experience with specific tools and
technologies, you will undoubtedly be posed many
questions related to soft skills-- namely, prowess
in communications, collaboration, and conflict
management/negotiation. Remember-- a large part
of DevOps is about reducing or eliminating friction
between groups entirely for shortening feedback
loops, so any experience you can speak of in this
regard helps. And because DevOps is by nature
cross-functional and cross-disciplinary, employers
look favorably at any instances/projects in which
you were able to wear multiple hats, perhaps-- both
on the engineering as well as operations side of
things. If youre an engineer who has played the role
of developer-- or vice-versa-- you will be regarded
favorably by potential employers.
Be prepared to discuss topics around scope
maintenance, workflow streamlining, setting
objectives amongst team members, and resolving
conflicts, among others. Again-- at the end of the
day, technical skills are only part of the equation
when it comes to DevOps. A skilled DevOps
practitioner is able to use technical skills and tools
to augment and promoter tighter teamwork and
positive behavior for building optimal products and
services.

Sample Questions

1. How does HTTP work? How does a

web page appear in a browser?
2. What are some examples of how
you might scale a write/read-heavy
application? Why?
3. Tell me about the worst-run/bestrun outage youve been a part of.
What made it bad/well-run?
4. How would you assess how
deployable a system is?
5. How would you prepare for a
migration from one platform to
another?

For more DevOps interview questions, check out our blog

post 10 Sample DevOps Interview Questions.
8

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Conclusion
In short, the outlook is bright for those with experience
and familiarity with DevOps processes and tools.
A recent study from Appvance found that 91% of
CIOs considered executing a DevOps strategy a top
priority for their organisation; 89% said that ensuring
confidence in the quality of their releases was key to
success, and 87% advocated increasing velocity and
productivity as top priorities. Indeed, organizations
across different industries are starting to realize the
cost of not embracing DevOps, and are subsequently
in dire need of individuals with both knowledge of the
unique internal IT and business culture as well as tools
and technologies.

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