DevOps Consultant: role, missions and development skills

What is the role of the DevOps consultant?

The DevOps job requires a dual skill set as it links the teams responsible for IT development with those who manage and ensure the stability of applications. Before the creation of this profession, the development engineer and the system administrator worked independently. The DevOps profession thus creates a bridge between two professions. It has therefore become strategic in the company, allowing it to gain speed and agility in the exchange and processing of information. In other words, the role of the DevOps consultant is to improve the capacity and delivery time of applications and services.

He is responsible for evolving traditional software development processes and, at the same time, optimizing products. His missions lead him to administer, set up and manage computer systems. These systems must be developed according to the needs of the company and help it to optimize all its processes. This optimization involves the implementation of full automation of application production. The ultimate goal is to reduce human actions in order to deliver products as quickly as possible.

In concrete terms, the DevOps job ensures that the applications developed meet all the criteria for running on the servers. It automates processes to ensure continuous deployment, which includes monitoring the proper functioning of applications, testing in a production-like environment, and ensuring quality of operation. His role also consists of making the teams of developers aware of the production constraints and the importance of autonomy, in order to gain in speed.

The DevOps engineer of the company or the DevOps consultant is the guarantor of the quality of the information system. Indeed, he must ensure quality control so that the production launch goes smoothly and when a problem arises, he must solve it quickly.

The skills required to become DevOps

The DevOps engineer has a cross-functional role that requires a good command of the IT development stages, as well as a good understanding of the challenges of continuous deployment and production. The DevOps job requires the mastery of various skills. First of all, you must master the technical skills that the job requires. The DevOps consultant must thus:

• have a thorough knowledge of the programming language used by the company’s developers with whom they work,
• use building and virtualization tools: Team Foundation Server, Docker, Kubernetes, etc,
• know how to develop scripts and do integrations,
• know how to set up continuous integration chains (CI/CD)
• know the operating system environment: Linux, Windows systems,
• master automated testing and deployment monitoring tools,
• Be a stickler for data security and have excellent knowledge of server systems
• work on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and others as well as on On-Premises platforms.

In addition to technical skills, the DevOps engineer must have the ability to evaluate the functioning of applications, make technical adjustments and measure the performance of developed solutions.

If technical mastery is crucial, the human qualities of the DevOps consultant or engineer represent a major asset in his or her relations with other teams and the hierarchy. In addition to management skills, he/she must be able to listen to the demands of the client and the teams. It is therefore essential that they have good interpersonal skills to better understand the needs and to exchange more easily:

• He/she must be able to manage and lead the teams with which he/she collaborates,
• He or she must always have a certain distance from the project in order to carry it out and respect the objectives set,
• He must be able to formulate requests in technical language,
• it must be able to federate all participants in order to develop a personalized and coherent solution.

Not every DevOps engineer is proficient in every programming language, especially novices. A good engineer must therefore have the ability to quickly learn tools or deployment technologies for the company to succeed in its digital transformation.

Moreover, the company that needs to recruit a DevOps engineer or hire a DevOps consultant will focus on DevOps practices. In other words, it will pay particular attention to the work processes of the practitioner. The latter will have to know different cloud computing solution providers. Finally, a good DevOps engineer must regularly do a technology watch to stay on the cutting edge in his field. He must be on the lookout for new languages and new digital tools.

Also read in our "project governance" file:

• Project comitology: the governance bodies of an IT project and their roles
• Steering and governance of an HR project: which profiles should be involved?
• Steering and governance of a Finance IS project: which profiles should be involved?
• Steering and governance of an IT project: which profiles should be involved?
• Project governance: what role for the steering committee?
• The actors of a project team: organisation, role and skills
• The IS manager at the heart of the development and evolution of systems
• HRIS Manager: what role in the evolution of HR Information Systems?
• IS project manager : what role and responsibility in an IS project?
• Functional consultant: a role close to the business processes
• Technical consultant: a profession at the heart of technological development
• Solution architect : a profession that manages development and deployment
• DevOps Consultant: role, missions and development skills
• Data Protection Officer (DPO): what roles and missions?
• CISO: a key job within the business for system security
• The service delivery manager at the heart of team management
• Scrum master, a key profession for Scrum project management
• Data scientist: a strategic profession at the service of management
• MOA / MOE: how are the roles divided on an information system implementation project?