Over the past 5 years, the DevOps space has been substantially growing and becoming the most popular approach to implement a more innovative and efficient IT infrastructure administration. DevOps is seen as a mentality.
DevOps is linking software development and IT administration as it bridges the gap between these two sectors of the IT world. However, even though the IT industry is clearly moving in this direction, it is not always easy to determine what the boundaries of the best practise are and the technologies that are needed to implement this new approach.
DevOps Engineers are required to have a broad professional background, which is generally a mix between IT Administration hands-on experience and deep knowledge/light hands-on development skills.
Solid experience with Linux, Cloud (AWS, GCP and Azure) are the most popular technologies; .Net and Windows can be relevant too but not as much in demand as the open-source. Basic experience with scripting languages isn’t enough to become a DevOps professional.
On another note, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a more mature sector, close to DevOps but with a clearer objective and structure; the SRE clearly focuses on optimising an existing code so it requires solid software development skills firstly, combined with decent IT Administration abilities. Linux, Cloud, PHP and Python are the most used technologies once again.
Overall, there is one thing that merges DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering, which is Automation. Kubernetes and Terraform are in demand but it is quite rare to find talent with this experience in the Maltese market. Other popular automation technologies are Puppet, Docker, Jenkins, Bamboo, Ansible, Chef, Git and Nagios. Together with Automation, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are essential – TeamCity, CircleCI and GitLab CI are some examples.