DevOps engineer salary range:
$64,000 - $136,000 per year. Source:PayScale.
In a nutshell: What is a DevOps professional
When technology companies are on the rise, DevOps engineers and managers are among the most wanted roles. DevOps is short for development and operations, and this role aims to create synergy between the departments of software development (Dev) and systems management (Ops). DevOps promotes smooth communication between technical teams in the company that is responsible for creating the product and delivering it to the client.
What skills are needed?
Soft skills: DevOps professionals need curiosity, openness, and willingness to learn. In DevOps jobs, it is important to know how to validate and potentially implement new technologies. DevOps should keep up with trends and best market solutions and have a desire to keep improving and developing implemented systems.
Because DevOps professionals work closely with development and data science teams on ongoing projects and deployments, they also need great communication skills to succeed in their role. Finally, they'll need analytical thinking skills in order to investigate and triage ongoing issues.
Tech skills: DevOps professionals require the ability to administer, monitor, and maintain a global server infrastructure. They must have knowledge of Linux Debian, Ansible, HAProxy, Varnish, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Node.js, Redis, MySQL scaling, monitoring, and debugging skills.
They also should be able to design and build scalable, highly available, and redundant infrastructure for company products.
How to stand out in an interview
Show that you can get a job done. Instead of just presenting what skills you possess, talk about your last job and achievements. For instance: "I led an Agile team of five developers and two Sysadmins to continuous deployment of SaaS real estate solution with 1 million+ users." Or "I maintained a network of 30+ Unix servers with 99.9 percent up-time."
Achievements and real-life examples are what recruiters want to see. Some companies, apart from asking you questions, will also perform technical screenings. You may be asked to take an online test similar to those from Devskiller.
Bonus: Sample interview questions
Question: What tools do you know to support DevOps?
Answer: It is the philosophy of introducing changes to the application code – the development team introduces a number of small changes in the code, which are then periodically checked in the code version repository. Because most modern applications require code creation using various platforms and tools, the team of programmers will, therefore, require mechanisms for "connecting," thus checking the correctness of code changes introduced by individuals.
Question: What is Continuous Integration?
Question: What does Continuous Delivery mean?
Answer: Continuous delivery begins where continuous integration ends. The CD automates the process of application implementation and introduced changes in the code to the prepared server infrastructure.
The massive remote work shift due to COVID-19 has increased interest in SDPs, with 70% of respondents polled for a new report saying they're now considering adopting one in the coming year.
Image: iStockphoto/anyaberkut
A new report has found that interest in software-defined perimeters (SDPs) as an alternative to VPNs has exploded since COVID-19 forced more than half of the US workforce to go remote. The report, based on a survey of IT professionals performed by software company NetMotion, found that VPNs, which have long been the standard way to securely connect remote workers to corporate computing assets, are starting to cause trouble for new remote workers and organizations alike.
From an IT perspective, VPNs are a huge blind spot, the report said. "For most IT teams, it's almost impossible to get visibility into the devices, networks, and activity of these remote workers--certainly much less than when an employee is in a company office." Sixty-four percent of respondents said that they're unhappy with the level of visibility they have into remote workers, to which NetMotion said SDPs are the ideal solution. For starters, 89% of remote workers have reported issues accessing data and applications needed to complete work at home, and with 87% of organizations saying they're still using VPNs, there's certainly some overlap.
Software-Defined Perimeters (like VPNs) are a method of remotely connecting to an organizational network and "extending the perimeter" of that network's security and infrastructure around the remote worker.
Where they differ from VPNs is in their zero-trust security backbone, which provides a high level of visibility into who is connected, what machine they're connecting on, and where that machine is located. Zero-trust architecture that goes into building SDPs includes least privilege security, which gives users the bare minimum access to resources needed to accomplish their task, preventing an intruder from moving laterally inside a network.
VPNs don't offer that level of security and are instead a direct connection to business networks through an encrypted channel--a malicious actor that gains access has the ability to go wherever they like, within the limits of the permissions of the account they've stolen.
Ninety-seven percent of respondents to the survey believe that remote workers are a higher cybersecurity risk than in-office employees, but despite what seems to be a multitude of reasons to ditch VPNs, the report also found that 45% of respondents think their organization will still be using a VPN for the next three years.
The reason for the disconnect, NetMotion said, is the high number of on-premise applications that organizations still use, with more than three-quarters of respondents having at least four on-premise apps.
A report from the Cloud Security Alliance (PDF) indicates that SDPs are equally capable of securing both cloud-based and on-premise applications, but NetMotion said in its recommendations in the report that businesses planning to migrate to SDPs should still maintain a VPN "to ensure security and positive user experience."
NetMotion's report was published in conjunction with the release of its new platform, which combines its SDP and VPN into a single product.