Belitsoft > Hire Dedicated Developers > Hire Dedicated DevOps Engineers

Hire Dedicated DevOps Engineers

In 99% of cases, a DevOps engineer does not exist as a single person. Often, it's a team of 2 and more engineers because DevOps covers so many skills and responsibilities that a single person cannot know all of this as thoroughly as you’d like him to. The fact of hiring a person who puts DevOps in his CV guarantees nothing. That’s why it’s the key to define clearly what job responsibilities these specialists need to take on and what your final goal is: managing cloud migration, building a software product from scratch, or ensuring your infrastructure security.

Contents

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the software development best practice that unites formerly siloed roles of development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security. 

DevOps teams automate processes that originally have been manual and slow. They use a tech stack and tools that help DevOps engineers operate quickly and accomplish tasks independently (code deployment or infrastructure provisioning) that typically would require involving other teams, which increases an overall velocity.

As a result, the business adopting the DevOps culture builds reliable products that better respond to customer needs, delivers these products more rapidly, and competes more effectively in the market.

The DevOps culture gets divided into narrower sub-categories, for example,

  • CloudOps is the practice of improving the performance of your applications and infrastructure in the cloud, automating continuous compliance, and setting up centralized control, agility, and scale across all environments.
  • DevSecOps is the practice of introducing security earlier in the software development life cycle, including PCI compliance (the security of credit card transactions), CIS compliance (setting benchmarks for protecting the company´s systems and data from cyberattacks), patching, etc.
  • InfraOps/SysOps is the practice of automating and optimizing cloud infrastructure operations, including performing predictive capacity planning, provisioning a new workload to the cloud, or scheduling a resource shutdown.
  • and others.

Why Your Business Needs DevOps

Ensure software security to drive user satisfaction

DevOps helps create software products that have fewer bugs and vulnerabilities, boosting user satisfaction and your brand image. DevOps engineers widely use automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques to retain control and preserve compliance.

Deliver rapidly and frequently to build a competitive advantage

DevOps teams innovate and improve an end product faster due to applying CI/CD pipeline that automates manual and slow processes and speeds up the software release from build to deployment. The quicker your development team fixes bugs and releases new features, the faster your business responds to customers’ needs, adapt to changing markets better, and gains competitive advantage. 

Guarantee software reliability to bring positive UX

DevOps engineers apply monitoring and logging to stay informed of software performance in real time. Use CI/CD best practices to ensure that each software update and infrastructure change is functional and safe. These best practices are the key to maintaining high software reliability while delivering at a more rapid pace. As a result, your product and brand bring a positive experience for end users.

Scale software securely and easily to favor business growth

DevOps engineers use the microservices architecture to manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Besides, DevOps teams use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for managing your development, testing, and production by automating repeating, manual processes. The IaC technique helps you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk.

Improved collaboration to drive higher performance and better results

The DevOps model implies building more effective teams with a focus on ownership and accountability. DevOps engineers cooperate closely, share many job functions and responsibilities, and combine their workflows. As a result, such an approach reduces inefficiencies and saves time due to avoiding long handover periods between developers and operations.

Save up to 40% on Development/Security Compliance/Maintenance costs with Belitsoft´s DevOps engineering team. Talk to our business development manager to get a free quote.

Must-Have DevOps Skills and Job Functions

Whatever your business needs are, the software development cycle remains equal:

  1. planning,
  2. developing,
  3. delivering,
  4. and the operational part (monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting).

To actively participate in each stage and perform effectively, make sure your DevOps team fulfills the core skills and job functions, essential for each stage of the development cycle.

Compared to traditional software development, in DevOps teams, remote dedicated developers work along the entire software development lifecycle, from development and QA to deployment to operations. So each engineer in such a DevOps team develops a skillset not limited to a single function.

However, due to such diversity of functions, the DevOps label covers a vast array of engineers with various skills and responsibilities.

We know! It’s hard even to read such a list of skills thoroughly. Imagine how a single person can know all of this as thoroughly as you’d like him to. This is why, ideally, DevOps refers to a team and not a single person. Only such an approach will bring your business the expected outcomes.

1. Planning Skills and Responsibilities

  • Understand customer requirements and project KPIs.
  • Use Jira to optimize collaboration, prioritize tasks, and manage regular reporting on the progress.
  • Manage Agile software development with Scrum to create iterative development and delivery process with constant feedback.
  • Use Kanban boards to visualize progress.
  • Create backlogs to plan further development adequately.
  • Set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project-tracking systems, and wikis.

2. Software Developing Skills and Responsibilities

Continuous Integration

  • Select and use a suitable development environment, e.g., IDEs like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse for Java, or IntelliJ IDEA.
  • Build the code into artifacts to deploy into various environments.
  • Commit changes to a shared repository using a version control system such as Git.
  • Run local unit tests, integration tests, load tests, API reliability tests, etc as an extra verification layer before integrating a new piece of code to validate updates and pre-emptively discover issues.
  • Apply Trunk-based development methodology to merge small, frequent updates to a core “trunk” or main branch.
  • Automate the creation and replication of multiple environments for testing in the cloud.

Cloud computing

  • Be skilled in AWS cloud migration services, Azure, and GCP to create and design serverless apps with AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Amplify, Amazon DynamoDB, or similar tools for Azure/Google Cloud.
  • Work with cloud-native architecture environments, perform load-balancing, autoscaling, clustering launches per region, queueing long-running tasks to create highly scalable systems in the cloud.
  • Know and work with Kubernetes clustering: Amazon EKS, Azure EKS, and Google Kubernetes Service to automate many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.

3. Delivering Skills and Responsibilities

Continuous Delivery

  • Work with DevOps platforms that offer delivery automation, e.g., GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines to decrease the deployment time.
  • Have skills in at least one CI/CD tool (Jenkins, Shippable, GitlabCI, Buildkite, TeamCity, Codefresh for Kubernetes, Semaphore, etc ) to make frequent, error-free, predictable software releases.
  • Deploy and launch web app stack, e.g. Java app, MERN stack, or Python / Django application.
  • Define a release management process with clear manual approval stages.
  • Set automated gates to move applications between stages until the final release to customers.

Microservices

  • Create microservices architectures for SaaS applications to deploy releases more often and without disruptions to the entire system.
  • Automate building and software testing processes to ensure that code in the main branch is always production-quality.
  • Follow access control policy as a data security technique to prevent unauthorized physical or remote access to company data.
  • Have a unified and automated pipeline to build and deploy services to mitigate the risk of having many small independent and diversified code bases.
  • Use deployment techniques such as blue-green or canary release for non-breaking changes to keep up with service updates.
  • Optimize the deployment process using such tools as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) or others.

Infrastructure as Code

  • Apply IaC methodology as a part of CI/CD to ensure release consistency and velocity.
  • Speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code (IaC) by applying tools like AWS Cloud Formation, Azure Resouce Manager, Terraform, Ansible, Chef platforms, etc.
  • Scale infrastructure and manage resources across multiple accounts and regions through a single operation.
  • Extend and manage infrastructure to include cloud resources published in the CloudFormation Registry, the developer community, or libraries.
  • Automate resource management across your organization with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud service integrations offering turnkey application distribution and governance controls.

4. Maintaining and Troubleshooting Skills and Responsibilities

Security compliance

  • Handle security incidents including hacks, security audits, hardening of servers, and user security controls such as SSH keys, permissions, SSL certs, encryption, and API key encryption.
  • Work with all the technical qualifications from security compliance, creating a VPN, hardening containers, adopting DevSecOps, Vuln assessments, patching vulnerabilities, and disaster recovery strategies.
  • Be familiar with at least one of the following regulations: HIPAA, PCI, or SOC2.
  • Identify and deploy cybersecurity measures by continuously performing vulnerability assessment and risk management.

Monitoring and Logging

  • Capture and consolidate user activity and API usage across locations and accounts on a single, centrally controlled platform.
  • Monitor, store, and validate activity events for authenticity. Easily generate audit reports required by internal policies and external regulations.
  • Improve operational performance using alarms and automated actions set to activate at predetermined thresholds.
  • Continuously monitor API usage history using automation tools to spot unusual activity in your accounts and determine a root cause.
  • Visualize performance data, create alarms, and correlate data to understand and resolve the root cause of performance issues

Troubleshooting

  • Understand if it is a DevOps issue or a code issue and channel it to the right tech team.
  • Apply troubleshooting techniques to diagnose issues with your pipeline and fix the code bugs.

Database Maintenance

  • Maintain and administer databases.
  • Have proficient knowledge to troubleshoot, create and build database clusters, such as Mysql, RDS replicas, PostgreSQL, MongoDB sharding, etc.

No matter your tech stack, our DevOps team has got you covered. We ensure you are matched with the right resource based on your requirements to timely deliver a product that customers are willing to pay for.

A Real-Life Business Case When to Choose a Dedicated DevOps Team

When a business gets a DevOps team, and not a single person who can superficially do dozens of things, the outcomes are fast, reliable, and future-proof.

Let's see how it works with real businesses.

A global creative technology company Technicolor with 100+ years of market presence opted for Belitsoft's DevOps team to design, build, and maintain a core business app for managing their 17,000 employees over the world.

We provided a team of 19 specialists:

  • 1 Business analyst to create requirements specifications, analyze requirements, and translate a business idea into a well-documented workflow,
  • 1 Project manager to plan, communicate, and arrange the development process effectively,
  • 1 Designer to create engaging, intuitive, and functional User Experience,
  • 9 Backend developers to build a powerful and highly-scalable backend behind the app,
  • 4 Frontend developers to make User Interface clear and responsive, 
  • 3 QA engineers to ensure smooth, rapid, and error-free app functioning.

Belitsoft arranged a highly-effective DevOps pipeline at all stages from planning and developing to delivering and troubleshooting to deliver a top-quality, scalable, and secure software product rapidly.

As a part of a DevOps culture, Belitsoft also retained key members of the development team on the project to keep up a high performance level and deliver results even faster. Moreover, our development team scaled up and down on the client’s demand. Our DevOps engineers were also proactive in recommending solutions that could save budget when possible.

As a result of the DevOps teamwork, the Client received a full-featured web application that thousands of enterprise employees use daily to perform daily tasks. Belitsoft and Technicolor continue working mutually to enhance the software functionality further while keeping its reliable and fast performance.

Development tools: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, SSMS, DataGrip, Data Migration Assistant for migrating the SQL database.

Azure architecture components: Azure Front Door, Azure App Service, Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, Azure SQL Database, Application Insights, Azure VPN, Network Interfaces, Network Security Groups, Private Endpoints, Storage Accounts.

Get DevOps engineers with the required skillsets in Belitsoft’s pool of 400+ specialists

Never miss a post! Share it!

Written by
CTO
5.0
7 reviews

Rate this article

Our Clients' Feedback

technicolor
crismon
berkeley
hathway
howcast
fraunhofer
apollomatrix
key2know
regenmed
moblers
showcast
ticken
elerningforce
Let's Talk Business
Do you have a software development project to implement? We have people to work on it. We will be glad to answer all your questions as well as estimate any project of yours. Use the form below to describe the project and we will get in touch with you within 1 business day.
Contact form
We will process your personal data as described in the privacy notice
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply
Call us

USA +1 (917) 410-57-57

UK +44 (20) 3318-18-53

Email us

[email protected]

to top