DevOps can be a little bit hard to understand, as this term encompasses many different things. However, once you understand it and its advantages, you won’t have any trouble understanding why you should hire a DevOps engineer.
DevOps covers numerous concepts, supporting operations and development engineers working together throughout the whole service lifestyle. This includes everything from development to design to production.
Software development focuses dominantly on writing, implementing, testing, and fixing code. Operations on the other hand concentrate on the systems that run the code. It makes sure that proper processing power is allocated to the software.
This means that even though these two groups can be working on the same system, they do not communicate with each other well, leading to more issues during the full process. With DevOps, however, these two different types of engineers become more unified to cooperate and communicate much more efficiently.
Many of the main focuses in DevOps is “to strongly advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction, from integration, testing, releasing to deployment and infrastructure management.”
This increased unity does more than merely raise team morale. According to Puppet’s State of DevOps report, those businesses utilizing DevOps practices “deploy code up to 30 times more frequently than their competitors, and 50 percent fewer of their deployments fail.”
If you hire a DevOps engineer to incorporate these practices, all of the research points to your team accomplishing much more, efficiently and quickly. This collaboration among team members helps you not only deliver applications with more speed but also more functionality and innovation.
DevOps Engineer Roles and Responsibilities
It’s often difficult to fully understand what the role of a DevOps engineer is because it’s a product of a dynamic workforce that keeps in continual evolution. The career of a DevOps engineer is not entirely defining and most of them have different IT backgrounds.
DevOps engineers work in the development, quality control, deployment, and integration of software development into a single, continuous set of processes. Their role encompasses the need of organizations to have cloud infrastructures.
DevOps engineers main responsibilities include:
- Build and set up development tools and infrastructure.
- Work on ways to automate and improve development and release processes.
- Test and examine code written by the other team members.
- Identify technical problems and build solutions.
- Plan out software projects.
- Test code, processes, and deployments to identify ways to minimize errors.
- Recommends performance enhancements by performing gap analysis.
Why Hire a DevOps Developer
While the numbers are clear, let’s look a little more in-depth about why you’d want to hire a DevOps engineer.
1. Stability and Innovation
When you have your development team and operations team split into two wholly different groups, they are judged differently. The developers are praised if they deliver a certain number of updates and new features to the end-user. The operations team, on the other hand, is judged based on how the system handles the application and if it remains healthy.
If you hire a DevOps engineer to utilize DevOps practices, though, the team works together on both the health of the system and the innovation of the update. Because of the intense unity of the teams working on a shared codebase with continuous integration, along with automated deploys and test-driven techniques, means that the code is efficient at every stage of the process.
2. Improved Effectiveness and Customer Experience
If you are creating software, whether you’re in development or operations, the main goal is to release high-quality software that end users will appreciate. With DevOps, you can produce software at a much faster pace, getting innovation to your customers more quickly, and have fewer bugs or performance issues, creating a better user experience.
With DevOps continuous software delivery, quicker resolution of problems, higher employee engagement, and more, your customers will certainly be happy. Of course, on the part of the company, this leads to high revenue and increased satisfaction with your business.
Let’s not forget that your teams are wasting less time sitting around waiting for the other team to get back to them about an application or system. This isn’t just frustrating for the boss losing money by paying employees on wasted time, it leads to unhappiness among bored employees as well.
3. Take Your IT Team to a Whole New Level
If you’re looking for ways to scale your team and have someone that can standardize specific procedures, make sure that software is running efficiently, and identifies errors on other team member’s code, among many other tasks, a DevOps engineer is perfect for your team.
Especially if you hire a remote DevOps engineer, you know only will you have someone talented enough to make sure things are running smoothly in your IT team, but you’ll also get the best talent available worldwide – and even save money doing so! Hiring remote engineers open a world of new possibilities where you can find a talented candidate that lives in a country with a lower cost of living.
Best Interview Questions for a DevOps Engineer
So, clearly, DevOps has its benefits. However, if you’re looking for a DevOps engineer to hire, it could be difficult because there isn’t yet a formal career track to become one. They must be very well-versed in both development and operations and have years of experience, meaning that the group of truly talented DevOps engineers is rather exclusive.
So, let’s look at some of the questions you can ask to make sure they’re an expert before you hire a DevOps engineer.
1. What makes DevOps different from Agile?
Well, Agile focuses on principles regarding production, like developing software. However, software made using Agile values might only run in particular environments, such as in testing. Using DevOps techniques, though, your team can more simply and safely move the software into production infrastructure.
While Agile does certainly perfect the development of software, DevOps incorporates both the development and the reliable deployment of this software.
2. Tell me about some of the most popular DevOps tools and which ones you have experience working on.
Some of the most popular DevOps tools include:
- Version control system tool, Git
- Continuous integration tool, Jenkins
- Continuous testing tool, Selenium
- Configuration management and deployment tools, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible
- Continuous monitoring tool, Nagios
- Containerization tool, Docker
As you can see, many of them relate to automation, something that’s very important in DevOps practices. With increased automation comes less room for mistakes and more time for your engineers to focus on the things that matter.
So, make sure that before you hire a DevOps engineer, they can speak on all or most of these popular tools so you know that they genuinely have experience.
3. Explain how all of these tools work together
If you hire a DevOps engineer, they need to understand more than just small sections. They need to know the logical flow of how all the tools work together. With this, they can assist with development and operations together.
This question helps to make sure that they understand everyone’s parts and the tools they use. Here, we can see a generic logical flow, as explained by Edureka, although keep in mind that this flow changes among each organization as they have different needs and requirements.
- Coders develop code that is managed by Version Control System tools, typically Git, and is sent to a Git repository.
- Everyone working on the code commits all changes to the repository.
- The code is pulled from the repository via Jenkins using the Git plugin, and then built with tools such as Maven.
- Puppet or other configuration management tools deploy and provision testing environments. This code is then released by Jenkins on the test environment. Here, tools such as Selenium test it.
- After testing, it’s sent for deployment on the production server by Jenkins. The production server is also provisioned and maintained by the configuration management tools like Puppet.
- Nagios continuously monitors it after deployment.
- Docker containers give your team testing environments to test features.
4. What are the benefits of using DevOps?
When it comes to the technical aspects, DevOps enables continuous software delivery, it’s less complex to manage, and it has early detection and faster corrections of defects. As for the business benefits, DevOps allows stable operating environments and also improved communication and collaboration among teams.
5. In DevOps what is the role of configuration management?
Configuration management enables the management of changes to multiple systems. It also standardizes resource configurations, and it helps with the administration and management of multiple servers.
6. Which are DevOps most popular tools?
The top DevOps tool generally speaking are Git (Version Control System tool), Jenkins (Continuous Integration Tools), Nagios (Continuous Monitoring tool), Docker (Containerization tool), Selenium (Continuous Testing tool), and Puppet or Ansible (Configuration Management and Deployment tools).
7. How do you find a list of files that have been changed in a particular commit?
The command to get a list of files that have been changed in a particular commit is:
git diff-tree –r {commit hash}
Example: git diff-tree –r 87e673f21b
- -r flag instructs the command to list individual files.
- commit hash will list all the files that were changed or added in that commit.
8. How can you deploy a custom build of a core plugin?
These are the steps to deploy a custom build of a core plugin:
- Copy the .hpi file to $JENKINS_HOME/plugins
- Remove the plugin’s development directory
- Create an empty file called <plugin>. Hpi.pinned
- Restart Jenkins
How to Hire a DevOps Engineer the Simple Way – DistantJob To Your Rescue
Talented DevOps engineers aren’t easy to find. They need to be gifted in both sides of the process, have plenty of experience, and be able to learn and adapt quickly. Hire a DevOps engineer without having to take the days or weeks to find and interview them. Instead, contact us so we can send you an expert DevOps who is highly vetted so you can be sure that your future software will have all the benefits that come from a DevOps engineer.
