What the hell is DevOps anyway? Many companies are hiring DevOps Engineers and it is a nebulous title – a hard skill set to nail down and most companies implementing it don’t really know what they are trying to do.
DevOps is the pipeline between developers and deployment to production traffic. The holy grail is Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment. Most companies have an idea of what this should be and they have Application Operations (AppOps, deployment junkies), Systems Engineers (sysadmins and networking skill sets), Release Engineers (repo plus build plus code ready for deployment) and DevOps, which is a hybrid bastard child of all of these. And a political football in companies with the other sections firmly established.
DevOps is repo through to build and test and acceptance, to creating an AMI to ready for prod deployment. Pipeline. All of the system admin skills and tools (bash & Spacewalk and AWS CLI), development tools (git, bitbucket, Jenkins, TeamCity), operations tools (ansible, packer, AWS, docker) have to be chained together in a logical manner to produce code that is present on servers and ready to take traffic. Plus ruby and ruby-on-rails, python and Amazon AWS CLI and CFN, languages for building toolsets and applications to streamline developer process.
I updated my resume because the last resume didn’t take into account the change in focus from System Admin (which is becoming a limited, first-line-support job title in some companies) to DevOps Engineer. I think my favorite title was “Member of the Technical Staff” (with egenera), but that didn’t continue as meaningful beyond 110 people. The stuff you’ve done in the last three years will be relevant – that’s even more true than it ever was. I’ve been at the same company now through three acquisitions, Jumptap -> Millennial Media -> AOL/Verizon, and I’m really excited about the pipeline we are building to proof-of-concept right now.
