Build and buy: Key to forming DevOps environment- Valutrics

Buy in order to build up DevOps environment

Stanger’s assessment speaks to the nature of DevOps, a decade-old concept in which the software development and operations teams work together on IT projects near simultaneously to build, test and release software frequently and rapidly. The goal — increasingly important in a cyber-threatened, super-competitive business environment — is to deliver highly useable products with higher security and better quality. DevOps is often considered a set of processes as well as a methodology, but it’s also reliant on and/or supported by various technologies including automation and cloud services.

As such, an enterprise IT shop that’s adopting DevOps needs developers and operations people who can collaborate, as well as technologists skilled in the technologies that underpin a DevOps environment, said Connor Leech, senior technical recruiter at Mondo, a tech-staffing agency.

Connor Leech

In particular, companies moving to DevOps will need technologists who can automate processes, set up systems to automatically handle fluctuations in demand, and work with cloud providers such as AWS, Leech said.

Those tasks require skills in specific areas and with specific technologies, he said. Technologists need to know, for example, automation and configuration management tools such as Puppet or Chef as well as performance management software such as New Relic. They should know popular scripting languages like Python, PHP or Ruby. They should also know hot new technologies such as Docker, an open-source tool that automates the deployment of Linux apps inside software containers.

This is where experience counts and the area where companies generally want to buy, rather than build, the talent to field a DevOps environment, Leech said.

“It’s definitely possible to retrain existing engineers in these areas, but because the tools are kind of complex, [CIOs] want people who have used them rather than have to teach people on them,” he explained. “It’s a common theme with hiring managers: They want someone who has not only played around with these, but have used them in a large production environment.”

Leech concurred, saying it’s smart for CIOs to buy these skills upfront and then use the new staffers to train existing workers.

“What’s really common is bringing in DevOps engineers as contractors. You bring in people on contract for six months, and they come in, help automate and ramp everyone up and then go and do another contract. They’re generally pretty expensive, but they’re incredibly valuable,” he said. “They can turn a company’s existing engineers into DevOps engineers.”