Why should you hire DevOps engineers for your business? And what are they exactly? As an HR manager, you may receive a request from the CIO to start recruiting for DevOps, but it can be hard to find the right team.
That’s probably because DevOps isn’t a person or a team, but rather a philosophy and framework for application development and the faster release of new and revised software features and products to the market.
When you hire a DevOps engineer, you are essentially hiring someone to coordinate between app development teams (Dev) and their IT operations team members (Ops).DevOps encourages collaboration, communication, integration, and transparency across teams which can help your company become more productive.
When you hire DevOps engineer teams, they will oversee the entire phase of the DevOps cycle, from software planning to actually building, coding, testing, and releasing the various phases. It goes beyond deployment to oversee operations and monitoring. This relationship is driven by customer feedback, enabling continuous improvement, development, testing, and release.
Some companies divide DevOps goals into the CAMS framework: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing. These tools make development and operational workflows more streamlined and collaborative so that the tasks that were previously very time-consuming, manual or difficult become simpler and faster.
Popular DevOps methodologies include the Kanban method, Scrum method, and Agile methodology. Note that when you hire DevOps engineers, other roles and titles in your company may change. For example, if a DevOps engineer uses the Scrum methodology, they may rearrange your developers into functional squads by appointing product owners and a Scrum Master. Or if they choose the Kanban method. They might need a project management software kanban for the same. It’s important that the team knows that changes may be afoot when you hire DevOps developer teams.
Why Should You Hire DevOps engineers?
DevOps is designed to break down the barriers in communication and collaboration between developers and IT operations teams, but the real core value of DevOps is all about customer satisfaction and delivering products to the end users at record speed. With the right DevOps engineer by your side, you’ll encourage innovation and drive continuous process improvement, which can impact your business in a positive way for many years to come.
By implementing the DevOps philosophy, you’ll encourage faster, better, and more secure delivery of business value to the end users of your company. This can include frequent product releases, features, or updates, but with the proper levels of quality and security. DevOps can quickly and easily identify bugs and issues and resolve and re-release your products more quickly.
DevOps is supported through the underlying infrastructure your teams will build, with seamless performance, reliability, and availability as it was developed and tested more thoroughly.
How to Hire a DevOps Engineer
When you hire a DevOps engineer, you need to look for very specific skills. It goes without saying that they should be good people managers and excellent communicators, but there are a few hard skills they need to master as well, including:
- Linux Fundamentals and Scripting, including administration, text processing, and process management.
- The ability to operate Linux servers and knowledge of scripting languages like Python.
- Knowledge of relevant tools and technologies, including version control, continuous integration servers, configuration management, and deployment automation. They should also understand cloud quality tools, network protocols, and testing and cloud quality tools.
- Cloud skills are essential, including database management and network management. They should understand Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GPC), and MS Azure.
- Coding and scripting skills, including knowledge of Node.js, Java, Ruby, Shell, and PHP, are essential.
- Automation skills are required to automate a full DevOps pipeline. They should understand automation tools like Source Code Management (SCM) and Ansible, an open-source tool.
- Testing skills are needed to identify bugs in projects and products. They should understand visualization and testing tools like Puppet and Chef.
- DevSecOps skills like code analysis, change management, and vulnerability assessments are very important, but it becomes critically important in industries like education, finance, or healthcare, where sensitive data needs to be handled and stored securely.
- Proactive Monitoring through tools like Nagios and Splunk is essential. They should be able to spot bottlenecks in the production system and upgrade system versions whenever necessary.
Interview Questions
Finding a candidate with the right skills is difficult, but knowing which questions to ask will make it easier.
Some of the questions you should ask include the following:
- What do you know about DevOps?
- In what way is DevOps different from agile methodology?
- Which are some of the most popular DevOps tools you’ve used?
- Describe the different phases in DevOps.
- What do you see as the core benefits of DevOps?
- How will you approach a project that needs to implement DevOps?
- Describe the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
- Name three important DevOps KPIs.
Where to find DevOps engineers?
Finding DevOps engineers can be a challenge, but there are a few avenues you can try. Firstly, conventional job boards and newspaper or online classifieds ads. This approach is the broadest, and you can find many candidates this way. On the downside, interviewing and sourcing candidates can be time-consuming. It’s a good idea to ask internal candidates to apply for the role as well. You never know if someone is ready to step into a new role. However, this does limit your candidate pool.
Secondly, asking for recommendations is a good option. Your team may have already worked with a good DevOps engineer in the past. You can encourage recommendations through referral incentives, e.g., paying a small bonus if a recommendation results in a hire. However, depending on the team dynamics, this may lead to some disruptions or jealousy from internal team members.
Finally, consider outsourcing. You can hire fantastic developers from other nations who can manage your team and scrums with ease.
Conclusion
There are plenty of reasons to hire DevOps engineers for your business. Make sure that you ask the right questions and find the person with the right skills to implement your DevOps framework.
