DevOps have become an important part of software companies these days. The DevOps team sets the speed of automated workflows. They create better infrastructure, increasing the overall performance of the company. DevOps is a versatile specialist whose main responsibility is to support the development team and operations team. They optimize specific pieces of infrastructure and enable businesses to improve security and efficiency.
You need to hire well-versed and passionate software developers. It becomes more important if you want to build a DevOps team. It’s essential to build a strong and unified foundation. According to Enterprise DevOps Skills research, 58% of people believe that recruiting the right DevOps employees is hard, while 48% respond retaining them is difficult.
So here are some tips on how to hire a skilled DevOps Engineers-
Fundamental Knowledge
Today, many engineers can spin cloud infrastructure up, but they must understand underlying fundamentals. It is essential they know computing infrastructure well. Some of the crucial concepts you can test them on are servers’ work, boot running containers, encryption, networking technologies, and the basics of database and data stores. This knowledge is important, especially when something goes wrong and requires debugging, which needs deep understanding.
Experience
Though formal training is helpful for engineering candidates getting started, it does not provide enough knowledge to become a DevOps engineer. It is not enough to be able to take responsibility for the operations of a production platform. You need a candidate who can’t just build the platform but can lead, debug and operate. Many DevOps engineers have no formal training but, with more than a decade of experience, honed themselves. Interview them thoroughly, and formal technical training can not be a replacement for experience.
Infrastructure Engineering
This is a core DevOps skill. It relates to standardizing, containerization, reliability, cloud and management. The infrastructure DevOps team needs these skills. They are essential for an application-oriented DevOps team. The knowledge of the underlying infrastructure technology is needed to match applications to standard models.
Security And Compliance
Compliance, Risk, and Security are about ensuring quality. An understanding of the risk associated with technology. Knowledge of functionality being created and surety of business rules coding. All critical components must ensure that applications provide value to the customers.
Communications Skills
Opposite to the common stereotype, the best engineers are great communicators. They are always ready to figure things out. They ask questions at every step to create solutions and understand the requirements of the business. And DevOps engineers also require these skills. They work closely with the development team. Therefore, it becomes essential to communicate their ideas well.
Continuous Delivery
It is a crucial area of knowledge. This relates to the delivery of new code through a well-designed path from development to production. And also to the conceptual understanding of the process. Continuous delivery requires a deep understanding of the whole IT delivery process.
Programming Skills
DevOps team is responsible for supporting applications, stacks and platforms which require programming skills. IT professionals are needed to write the software codes. This makes it important for the DevOps team to have sound DevOps knowledge. You can look if the candidates have gone through DevOps Foundation Training or not. The training helps them to learn more about DevOps and its working.
Business Knowledge
DevOps teams have improving impacts on both business processes and the software system supporting it. The DevOps team should be capable of conducting detailed business analyses to implement solutions. The implementation needed to be functional, cost-effective and time-saving. All this accounts for both functional and non-functional process development.
Optimization Of Business Value
This is a knowledge area in which business knowledge of IT is used to find changes bringing value to the business. People will have knowledge and understanding of business processes supported by IT services. They will communicate with business process leaders related to progress. The IT services are used as a feedback loop for the user. These days they are commonly used to optimize businesses.
System Architecture
Design knowledge is also crucial for the DevOps team since teams need to assess the changes. The changes to their technology stack and the one connected to the IT services too. That is where knowledge of system architecture and design comes into play.
Conclusion-
The current cloud market needs experienced and talented candidates to support AWS/GCP journeys. The job requires a combination of skill sets. To hire the experts, you are required for the job. You should be asking the right questions and testing them on the right skills. Only then you can create a DevOps culture that can help grow your organization. Moreover, you can also check if the candidates have DevOps Foundation Certification to ensure if they are suitable for your firm or not. This is not as difficult as it seems, so just look out for the passionate candidates that serve the company right.