Today’s DevOps teams are under immense pressure to deliver high-quality software and applications at an unprecedented speed.
To accomplish that, software development teams are leveraging advanced technologies to accelerate the software development lifecycle and maintain a compelling customer experience.
Yet, many DevOps teams face an overwhelming obstacle in their pursuit of next-generation infrastructure—the DevOps skills gap.
This blog explores the roots of the DevOps skills gap and its impact on organizations, and highlights best practices for integrating open source resources, automation tools, and a DevOps platform to help mitigate these challenges.
What is the DevOps Skills Gap?
The rapid rise of digital transformation has amplified the role of DevOps in helping organizations achieve speed, agility, and innovation.
However, many businesses are hitting a brick wall when it comes to accessing the necessary infrastructure to meet market demands. Complex software stacks, multi-cloud environments, and advanced Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools have become the backbone of a modern DevOps practice, but managing these resources requires a unique blend of coding, DevOps engineering, and expertise in infrastructure.
In fact, a survey of 500 software developers, DevOps, and IT decision-makers revealed that 85% of respondents face barriers to implementing DevOps best practices. The most significant challenge reported was a lack of skills within their teams, surpassing even issues with legacy infrastructure and corporate culture adjustments.
How Expertise Affects the DevOps Engineer Role & Responsibilities
At the core of this challenge lies a dramatic imbalance in resources. It’s not uncommon for hundreds of developers to rely on just a few skilled DevOps engineers to provision the environments they need. This mismatch creates bottlenecks, delaying critical software releases and frustrating both engineers and leadership.
While the typical software engineering team represents a variety of skills and expertise, the operations team often values those with the technical skills to deliver the resources they need.
This skills gap between the tools used to deliver the application environments supporting the software development lifecycle and the skills within the team is the root cause of these bottlenecks. All requests that require skills and expertise with cloud, IaC, Kubernetes, and other tools are routed to the select few who can execute them.
For many organizations, these delays aren’t just a minor inconvenience for a software developer—they can lead to lost market share, dissatisfied customers, and even damaged reputations.
How the DevOps Skills Gap Affects Software Engineering Teams
Amid growing demand to accelerate application release timelines, the impact of this strain on engineering and IT teams becomes more severe. The pressure to provide each software developer with immediate access to infrastructure often leads to longer work hours, higher stress levels, and an increased likelihood of burnout for each DevOps engineer supporting them.
Together, these challenges can make it more difficult to retain skilled DevOps engineers—resulting in further delays as leadership is forced to recruit, train, and onboard new engineers to backfill those who leave.
Some developers, frustrated by the delays, may attempt to bypass the DevOps team by orchestrating and provisioning their own development environments.
However, without a thorough understanding of infrastructure best practices or governance, these self-provisioned environments can introduce significant risks, including:
- Security and compliance vulnerabilities: Improperly configured environments may expose the organization to security breaches.
- Performance issues: Environments that are not optimized may lead to degraded application performance, affecting the user experience.
- Cloud cost overruns: Inefficient resource usage can lead to skyrocketing cloud costs that inflates the margins to deliver software and makes it more difficult to offer competitive pricing to customers
Organizations that opt to hire DevOps engineers to alleviate this pressure find that it often comes at a steep cost. Rising demand for expertise in technologies like Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, and other cloud-native technologies has corresponded with a notable rise in DevOps engineer salary. The competition for talent with these DevOps engineer skills is fierce, and companies often find themselves in bidding wars to secure the best candidates.
Even with additional headcount, the backlog of requests to orchestrate, provision, and maintain environments remains a persistent issue that makes it harder to retain DevOps engineers—making those higher salaries more costly to the organization.
Implementing DevOps Tools to Ease the Skills Gap
One promising approach to solving this problem is implementing DevOps tools that provide automation and control for DevOps engineers while extending self-service access to infrastructure and environments for each software engineer who needs it.
Here’s how this approach works:
1. DevOps Automation and Generative AI for Orchestrating Complex Development Environments
The complexity of modern development, testing, staging, and other application environments that support the software development lifecycle is a leading cause of the bottlenecks that slow down pipelines. Due to their unique nature, these environments often need to be built manually, and requires a cloud engineer with expertise in the various IaC tools and platforms used to define environment components. These requests result in significant work for those on the operations team with the expertise to fulfill them.
Even the process to create new Infrastructure as Code modules to define the state of cloud infrastructure needed to support software engineering workflows can be difficult to manage at scale.
Quali’s DevOps tools provide automation for these processes. This includes:
- Generating Infrastructure as Code files from resources in the cloud account: Quali Torque allows DevOps engineers to connect a public cloud account and automatically generate Terraform and OpenTofu Infrastructure as Code modules defining the resources deployed in that account. This automates the creation of modules that can be reused and automated throughout the software development lifecycles.
- Using AI to generate Environment as Code templates: Quali Torque allows users to submit natural-language AI prompts to automate the orchestration of ready-to-run templates for unique application environments. Based on the user’s Infrastructure as Code modules and other resources, Torque defines all the resources and services needed to support the application workload in a single source file that the user can launch on demand.
2. Making Infrastructure and Environments Repeatable
Compounding the complexity of orchestrating environments is the redundant nature of these tasks. Many environments need to be used frequently, requiring DevOps engineers to orchestrate the same environments repeatedly.
Repeatability is critical to reducing this redundant work. Quali Torque’s support for Infrastructure as Code modules and Environment as Code blueprints allow users to run resources on-demand without the need to build them every time they need them.
With reusable blueprints, modifications to infrastructure can be made in a single location, ensuring consistency across all future deployments. This significantly reduces the risk of human error and accelerates the provisioning process.
3. Enabling Self-Service Access for Developers
One of the most powerful aspects of this approach is the ability to provide self-service access to environments.
Equipped with reusable modules, DevOps engineers can offer self-service access for the developers, testers, and other end-users to deploy the environments they need on-demand without requiring direct intervention from the DevOps team. This allows organizations to scale efficiently and maintain developer velocity.
Meanwhile, role-based access controls prohibit developers from creating or modifying infrastructure or environment templates.
DevOps engineers can enhance this value by integrating environments into their CI/CD pipelines. Development teams can automate the deployment of environments at specific stages of development, ensuring that infrastructure is available when needed and automatically decommissioned when no longer in use.
This eliminates wait times for developers and ensures that environments are provisioned securely and cost-effectively.
4. Enforcing Governance for Cloud Infrastructure Supporting the Software Development Pipeline
A key aspect of this self-service model is the ability to enforce governance policies for the resources deployed.
Quali Torque’s policies automatically deny the provisioning of any cloud resources that violate standards set by administrators. This provides DevOps engineers the assurance that all application environments and infrastructure is configured to adhere to their security and compliance standards and to keep cloud costs within control.
5. Automate Routine Actions to Maintain Application Environments
Another factor contributing to the DevOps skills gap is the extensive maintenance required to ensure that the environments supporting the software development lifecycle perform correctly.
Many of these routine tasks are critical to ensuring the reliability, security, compliance, and cost efficiency of cloud infrastructure. Executing them, however, still requires manual intervention from skilled DevOps engineers that leaves less bandwidth for more valuable work.
Quali Torque helps to reduce this burden on DevOps teams in various ways:
- Visibility into the expected impact of updates to IaC modules: DevOps engineers update infrastructure code frequently, but typically lack the visibility to know how those updates might affect live development or production environments. Quali Torque shows all live environments that are supported by an individual infrastructure module so DevOps engineers can prevent any unanticipated impact of their changes and collaborate with those affected by those changes proactively.
- Automated Day-2 actions for infrastructure and environments: To facilitate routine tasks such as security and compliance reviews, environment healthchecks, or dynamic adjustment of infrastructure to support application needs—Quali Torque’s custom workflows define the action needed as a script that can be executed repeatedly. This includes the ability to execute the action on-demand via a single click in the platform as well as the option to automate the execution of these actions on a recurring basis (e.g. once per day) or in response to custom events.
Similar to the repeatability of infrastructure and environments, these tools help to eliminate some of the manual work that occupies skilled DevOps engineers.
Benefits of DevOps Tools & Automation That Bridge the Skills Gap
By implementing a platform approach and integrating the ecosystem of DevOps tools supporting the software development lifecycle, DevOps teams can:
- Maximize output for DevOps teams: By automating infrastructure provisioning and providing reusable templates, organizations reduce the manual work that slows down highly specialized DevOps professionals—creating more bandwidth for strategic initiatives.
- Accelerate velocity for software development teams: With self-service access and repeatability, developers can make environments a seamless part of their pipelines.
- Improve efficiency: Automated provisioning and the elimination of inefficient, manually provisioned environments help control cloud costs.
- Bolster security and governance: Centralized control over cloud security credentials and automated enforcement of governance ensures that environments are provisioned in accordance with security and compliance standards.
- Improved retention and morale for DevOps teams: Reducing the monotonous, time-consuming tasks allows for skilled DevOps engineers to contribute to the strategic direction of the software development organization.
To experience how Quali Torque supports DevOps teams, visit the interactive Torque Playground.