Your Guide to The Suits of DevOps

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DevOps or DevNOTS?

The sudden and sharp rise of Developer Operations (DevOps) roles has been industry-shifting. We have gone from seeing this role be new and niche in 2016 to now being a fully fleshed out and expanded job role in almost every single tech sector. So, what exactly is Dev Ops? And why do so many tech sectors actively require DevOps roles?

To get an accurate depiction of the developer operations role/DevOps role, one simply needs to look at one of the best companies for DevOps. In this case, that company is Microsoft. This is how Microsoft defined the DevOps role:

"DevOps combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to unite people, process, and technology in application planning, development, delivery, and operations. DevOps enables coordination and collaboration between formerly siloed roles like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security."

Let us dive deeper and expound on this statement by Microsoft. Essentially, what Microsoft is getting at is that DevOps roles exist to act as intermediaries in their companies. Specifically, they work as intermediaries between different areas of the tech department in a company. An example could be how a project manager on a tech project is an intermediary between the developers and management as well as other groups. Let us get more specific in our example. This means someone could be in DevOps, where their role could be maintaining a cooperative balance with the web development team he's on and the cyber security team in the other department.

So, we have established a DevOps role consisting of the worker being an intermediary between tech departments and at least two at a time. That said, it leads us back to the second question asked previously, "Why do so many tech sectors actively require DevOps roles?" First, let's establish if more and more companies at any enterprise level require these positions.

According to verified reports by Statista, the adoption and creation of DevOps positions rose from 33% of the companies in 2017 to 63% in 2020. It is worth nothing; this growth in number only reflects the most in-demand careers at that point in time. However, DevOps career adoption globally is showing no signs of slowing down.

Now that we know DevOps is a growing field, we should figure out the extent of it, right? How grand is its proliferation and adoption?

According to the Gartner group and radixweb.com:

• 99% of the organizations say they had a positive impact post-implementing DevOps in their organization in 2020.
  
• 61% of the businesses quoted that DevOps helped them in the best possible ways to produce higher-quality deliverables in 2020.

Based on this, we can safely assume DevOps is a field showing significant signs of broad industry acceptance. This beckons the main question, "Why do so many tech sectors now require a DevOps role?". Based on the data found, we can see that as the world grows in the technological areas, it also means the developer roles get more complex. Also, because of new technologies being built, new job types are being created e.g. AI Prompt Engineer, which became a role in early 2023. As a result of these crucial factors, DevOps is needed. You need a developer with a critical understanding of multiple technological disciplines to maintain order and improve product delivery across the various departments at once.

DevOps careers are essential, and they’re only growing by the year. With that said, what DevOps roles are there? Let’s address the main ones next.

The 5 Suits of DevOps:

We have established what DevOps is and lightly teased at its accelerated growth and significance in the tech industry. We are now ready to get deeper and ponder the different role types DevOps careers offer.

Development Integration Specialist:

What is a Development Integration Specialist? They are the person on your team whose job is to keep track of all solutions pertaining to the main product solution. That sounds weird, right? To break it down further, they are essentially in charge of fixing and figuring out solutions that block the testing, architecture, or development teams from creating the main product.

DevOps Manager:

A DevOps manager is very similar to a project manager. In fact, the distinction between them is almost minute. However, the differences are still there. DevOps managers oversee the development cycle like the project manager and keep track after deployment. However, unlike project managers, they take particular interest in the actual development of the application and work more with other related development teams than administration. This differs from traditional project managers who work more with administration, marketing, or other departments. This role suits developers who want a managerial position but still have a heavy focus on developer-related activities.

Automation Architect:

Remember how we said the integration specialist is responsible for solving all the team’s mini-problems in the development pipeline? Well, the automation architect is in charge of automating all development projects across the different departments. Their goal is to create automated solutions that enable the leading solutions by the different teams to be made faster. This is a particular role type, and as such, in most situations, an integration specialist may also be assigned automation architect duties in smaller enterprises. However, in large enterprises, automation architects are in their separate roles.

Security Engineer:

The Security engineer is also known as the S.C.E. (Security and Compliance Engineer). They are the representative of the security team or security group. This person’s primary goal is to work with the development team on the primary solution. They make sure the product is safe and secure. They bring up all security concerns related to the product and make sure there is no compromise of security in later updates of the product.

Experience Expert/QA/XA:

The experience expert role is extremely nuanced. It is someone who does work in either quality assurance or the front-end experience of the product. So, what exactly makes them DevOps? They work in Quality Assurance or User Experience, yes; however, they work more closely with the customer relations department. They focus on the customer’s needs entirely and try to convey and make that happen on the experience side of the product with the respective tech teams.

DevConfusion:

I know what you might be thinking. The roles I mentioned here are so specific. Some are so nuanced in their descriptors. How is it necessary to have this many nuanced but specific role types in future tech companies? We already hinted at this earlier, but let’s expand more on this. The truth is that more roles such as these are made, which means the tech industry is growing increasingly. Developing faster and creating these new super niche roles means more diverse people can enter the tech space and showcase their individual talent and hard work. At the end of the day, as annoying as these roles may look, they are highly beneficial to the industry and us as a whole.

Now that we know the different types of DevOps careers that are out there, now is your chance to jump-start your DevOps journey. Just remember one thing, DevOps or not: the tech world is growing, and your preferred niche is already there. If not, it’s going to be made very soon!