A DevOps engineer connects developers who want to make a product as fast as possible with engineers who support it. Nowadays devops as a service is popular all over the world. DevOps-specialists accompany the product lifecycle from beginning to end, help to bring all processes into one system and describe them, reduce development time, increase its efficiency and security. And if there is no such person in the team, somebody else will perform its functions, but this is an additional burden, which means a decrease in the quality of work. 

What DevOps does at work

DevOps-engineer deals with everything that increases speed and efficiency of development.

• Creation of tools and design of infrastructure for software development. 
• Automation of processes. For example, application performance checks. You have created it and must check if it can be logged in, if you can leave a comment, how the program behaves in the mobile version, etc. DevOps-engineers help to automate such checks. 
• Work with cloud technologies. The “cloud” differs in the method of data storage and processing from the computer, which means that the principle of its operation is different. DevOps Engineer helps organizations maximize the use of cloud environments while minimizing risk. 

• Solutions to urgent tasks. 
• Integration. For example, CI – Continuous Integration. Why do you need it? Usually, on projects, engineers write parts of the general code. Sometimes it happens that the code that works well on the computer where it was written will not run at all on another “machine”. In CI DevOps, the engineers collect the parts of the code that different developers have made and check if they compile. They also analyze these pieces of code and, according to the rules, give recommendations to improve security, eliminate potential bugs, etc. 
• Support and monitoring of processes. 

What DevOps should be able to do

The main skill, in my opinion, is the ability to quickly understand many different systems. Each system is made up of components – and you need to quickly understand each component and how they interact with each other. This also includes the skill of “troubleshooting”, which comes with time.  The fundamental skills that every devops needs:

• Knowledge of operating systems and how they work. This is indispensable, because any product is written and then works in a particular environment. Knowing the environment, we understand what it takes to make a product work properly. At the very least we need to know Linux and Windows. 

• The basics of programming. This is just like knowing letters and grammar to learn a foreign language. What are bits and loops, how to work with the code and its syntax and so on. – Important basic concepts, necessary in principle for anyone who wants to do something in IT. 
• An understanding of computer networks. What are the differences, how they work, the basic concepts are all important. There is a good example from practice when one of the customers, for some reason, placed his data center in a network that is available to everyone. 
• Possession of scripting language, preferably several. Bash, Python, PowerShell and others. Yes, DevOps-engineer does not develop the product directly, but is engaged in process automation, which is described in code. 
• Understanding of virtualization and containerization. 
• Knowledge of cloud systems. It’s simple: business now goes to the cloud resources, providers, hosting, and therefore, DevOps-engineer must understand them. And what’s more, he prepares infrastructure for development from different numbers and sets of cloud services. Someone may argue that this is not necessary.