Traditional application development approaches were linear, and new software releases took months to design and deploy. Over the years, developers faced immense pressure to deploy applications and provision new features at breakneck speeds. This emphasis on enhancing development speed gave rise to DevOps engineering.
DevOps engineering is about building bridges between software development and operations to accelerate and optimize the software delivery process. DevOps engineering’s rise was a milestone moment that would radically change application development environments and practices everywhere.
In this article, we’ll provide a high-level breakdown of DevOps engineering and the role of the DevOps engineer. We’ll also contrast DevOps engineering vs. site reliability engineering (SRE), another field that unifies aspects of software development and operations.
What is DevOps engineering?
DevOps engineering is an agile application development practice that works to unite two separate fields: general IT operations and software development. DevOps engineering doubles down on automation, integrations, communication, and collaboration to make software delivery pipelines faster and more efficient.
DevOps engineering doesn’t refer to a specific technology, workflow, or toolchain. Instead, DevOps engineering is more of a mindset shift, a cultural overhaul led by a common goal: to make software development lifecycles faster.
Fundamentally, it’s important to remember that a DevOps engineer is contributing to an operations team that works best when implementing highly collaborative shared responsibility models and the orchestration of myriad tools, processes, people, and technologies. Together, the unified components of DevOps engineering make developers more productive, teams more synergistic, and end users more satisfied.
Key DevOps principles and priorities of DevOps engineering
To dig deeper into DevOps engineering, let’s take a look at some of its binding principles and components.
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD): CI/CD merges multiple rounds of code changes within a common repository. That enables developers to test and deploy new code into production seamlessly, ensuring that end-users receive new software iterations swiftly and securely.
- Automation: In DevOps engineering, everything from code testing and integrations to infrastructure provisioning is automated. Automation mitigates human error, streamlines previously disjointed workflows, and allows developers to focus on more human-centric and creative responsibilities rather than repetitive tasks.
- Microservices: DevOps engineering replaces monolithic applications and architecture with a microservices architecture, which involves leveraging granular, independently deployable services. With a microservices architecture, developers can deploy new features without causing a large-scale ripple effect.
- Security: Often referred to as DevSecOps, DevOps engineering’s emphasis on security focuses on integrating and automating security mechanisms in software development lifecycles as early as possible. By doing so, DevOps engineering addresses security issues before they affect production.
- Cloud computing: To make the DevOps methodology a reality, developers need a highly dynamic, economical, easily accessible, and robust foundational infrastructure. Enter cloud computing. With cloud technologies, developers can access critical services and infrastructure, test applications in real time, and scale projects ad hoc.
- GenAI: According to Gartner, 56% of application development leaders claimed that GenAI is the most in-demand skill in 2024. With GenAI, developers can generate, test, validate, and deploy code at subsecond speeds. GenAI also helps predict potential issues in development environments.
- Communication and collaboration: By elevating the importance of communication and collaboration, DevOps engineering breaks down traditional silos, creates rapid feedback loops, and fosters a culture built on accountability, transparency, and teamwork.
Benefits of DevOps engineering
The following are the top eight benefits of DevOps engineering:
- Accelerated time to market: DevOps engineering ensures that developers can launch new software products, versions, and features faster than ever before.
- Fewer code vulnerabilities and bugs: Since DevOps engineering is heavy on automated testing and continuous feedback, there are fewer code issues to deal with.
- Enhanced developer productivity: With the automated mechanisms and advanced orchestration, a DevOps engineer can simply get more work done, all while staying motivated and creative.
- Faster issue remediation: Built on continuous monitoring, communication, and collaboration, DevOps engineering ensures that issues are discovered, prioritized, and remediated before they become disasters.
- Improved flexibility and scalability: With support from a DevOps engineer, developers can seamlessly scale projects at the drop of a hat through optimized and automated workflows, well-oiled CI/CD pipelines, and a strong cloud foundation.
- Boosted competitive advantage: In competitive markets, efficient development environments can be a serious game-changer. DevOps engineering can help provide an increasingly elusive competitive advantage.
- Seamless end-user experiences: DevOps engineering results in speed and reliability. For end users, this means faster access to new services, fewer disruptions, and no performance lags.
- Optimized costs: Since DevOps engineering improves resource utilization and reduces issues across the software delivery chain, fewer development costs are incurred, which can boost the bottom line.
Challenges of DevOps engineering
While an effective DevOps practice can offer so many benefits, implementing it also has a few challenges. For instance, highly rigid software development cultures may struggle to seamlessly evolve into a mature, highly technical DevOps practice. Furthermore, there may be issues with tool consolidation, integrations, and transitioning from legacy architectures to microservices.
Cost limitations and the lack of specialized skills can exacerbate these challenges. Another high-level challenge involves balancing security, speed, and quality across the application development pipeline. Lastly, without the right KPIs, it’s impossible to evaluate the efficacy of DevOps.
Top DevOps tools
Below is a list of important DevOps tools with examples.
- DevOps automation tools automate tasks across development workflows. Examples include Terraform and Ansible.
- Cloud environment platforms provision scalable cloud-based development infrastructure. Examples include Quali Torque.
- CI/CD tools help build optimized CI/CD pipelines for teams to design, test, and deploy applications. Examples include Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, and GitLab.
- DevOps testing tools automate the validation of application/release efficacy and functionality. Examples include Selenium and Mocha.
- Version control tools manage source code iterations. Examples include Git and Bitbucket.
- Containerization tools package applications into standalone containers. Examples include Docker and Kubernetes.
- Analytics tools derive actionable insights from data gathered from software delivery pipelines. Examples include Grafana and the trio of tools from ELK: Kibana, Elasticsearch, and Logstash.
- Monitoring tools track the performance and resilience of development environments. Examples include Prometheus and Sentry.
What is a DevOps engineer?
A DevOps engineer is an IT expert who codes at the crossroads of the software development and operations team. With skills in both fields, a DevOps engineer use automation tools to unite previously siloed development processes, optimize development infrastructure, merge code, and manage configurations for applications.
Anyone pursuing a DevOps engineer role should also prioritize skills in coding, configuration management, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, testing, Linux administration, and container management.
Key responsibilities of a DevOps engineer
There are many important jobs that fall under a DevOps engineer’s purview:
- Serving as the link between the operations and development teams
- Designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines
- Integrating security into the development lifecycle
- Managing and optimizing development infrastructure and resources
- Monitoring development environments
- Creating and mediating feedback loops and channels
- Proactively optimizing the application development lifecycle
What is the DevOps skills gap?
The rapid adoption of advanced DevOps automation tools has led to what we often describe as the “DevOps skills gap.”
Increased demand for complex infrastructure, supporting the software development lifecycle—such as advanced environments that require multiple resources delivered via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management, Kubernetes, and other tools—requires a unique combination of coding and infrastructure expertise.
As a result, the delivery and maintenance of these complex environment falls to the select few DevOps engineers with the advanced skills required to do so, which leads to
- Operational Bottlenecks: High demand for complex infrastructure and a limited number of DevOps engineers with the skills to deliver it often turns DevOps into a bottleneck, creating delays in environment provisioning and slowing down software releases.
- DevOps Engineer Burnout: The pressure on these DevOps engineers can result in longer work hours, increased stress, and higher turnover rates.
- Security Risks: Naturally, a software developer may attempt to circumvent these bottlenecks and provision environments without the oversight of a DevOps architect, resulting security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and increased cloud costs.
To address the DevOps skills gap, an operations team may turn to:
- Advanced DevOps Automation Tools: Implementing tools that automate the orchestration of complex development environments can reduce manual workloads and minimize errors.
- Automated Day-2 Actions: Beyond the delivery of environments, routine Day-2 actions required to optimize the performance, security, and efficiency of these environments can add to the bandwidth on even the most skilled DevOps engineer. Automating these actions can lift that burden and ease the DevOps skills gap.
- Self-Service Access: Providing developers with self-service access to deploy pre-configured environments empowers them to work independently while maintaining governance.
- Governance Policies: Enforcing policies to ensure all environments adhere to security and compliance standards provides the development team with access to the resources they need, while providing the operations team the assurance that all infrastructure is configured correctly.
DevOps engineering vs. site reliability engineering
Often, there’s confusion about DevOps engineering and overlapping fields like SRE.
The following table breaks down the difference between DevOps engineering vs. site reliability engineering into simple points.
| DevOps Engineering | SRE | |
| Focus Area | Developing collaborative, automated, and highly integrated software delivery pipelines | Maintaining system and service resilience and reliability in high-octane development environments |
| Scope | Standalone containerized applications and microservices across development environments | Full systems and infrastructure across operational processes and environments |
| Objectives | Optimizing and accelerating the software development lifecycle via automation, collaboration, and proactive improvement | Establishing and managing robust, scalable, and resilient live systems with varying workloads |
| Personnel | DevOps engineers Release managers CI/CD engineers Cloud management experts Cybersecurity experts Automation engineers QA Professionals | Site reliability engineer Tech leads Project managers System engineers System administrators Network engineers Testing engineers |
| Skill sets | Application development Automation CI/CD pipeline creation Cloud infrastructure management Containerization Coding IaC Monitoring and log management Cybersecurity
| Automation System administration Cloud platform management Coding Incident response Analytics and reporting Cybersecurity Root cause analysis and forensics Configuration management |
DevOps engineering vs. SRE isn’t quite an either-or situation. They are both integral to software development and operations. DevOps engineering focuses on building applications at speed and scale, and SRE focuses on making sure live applications run efficiently and can withstand fluctuating workloads and scalability needs.
With feedback from SRE teams, DevOps engineers can continuously optimize both the quality of software and software delivery pipelines.
Conclusion
DevOps engineering showers software delivery pipelines with myriad benefits. However, to kick DevOps engineering up a notch, DevOps teams need a powerful platform. Say hello to Quali Torque.
Torque is a comprehensive DevOps platform that leverages DevOps tools to orchestrate development infrastructure. With Torque, DevOps teams can benefit from self-service infrastructure provision, AI-driven orchestration, and automated governance.
The high-level benefits? Enhanced developer productivity, optimized cloud costs, complete visibility across development infrastructure, and unparalleled application quality.
Learn more about Torque for DevOps engineering teams here.