DevOps engineer oversees the software development lifecycle and has an outright understanding of various automation tools for developing the CI & CD pipelines. A DevOps engineer is responsible for working with developers and the IT staff on the organization to oversee the code releases. So, they are either the developers who get interested in the deployment and network operations or system admins who have a passion for scripting and coding and move into the development side where they can improve the planning of test and deployment. But what do the DevOps engineers do on a day-to-day basis? What are their daily tasks? This is what I will answer in this article on DevOps engineer daily tasks.
But before that, you need to know the different roles in the DevOps domains and the core responsibilities of a DevOps engineer.
What are the roles and responsibilities of DevOps engineer ?
Roles in DevOps
Let me first tell you about the roles that are present in DevOps.
- So, the first role in DevOps is of a DevOps evangelist. This person is responsible for implementing the overall DevOps life cycle, from planning and coding to the monitoring phase. So, an evangelist is someone who is responsible for implementing the entire DevOps pipeline.
- Next comes the release manager. The release manager is someone who releases new features and ensures post release product stability.
- After that, we have automation expert This person is responsible for achieving automation and orchestration of tools.
- And we also have developers and testers who develop and test the code.
- After that, we have QA folks, who are responsible for the quality of the product, and they check whether the product is as per the requirements.
- And finally, we have a security engineer, who constantly monitors the health and security of the product.
Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer
The key responsibilities of a DevOps engineer are:
- Administration of the IT infrastructure
- Choosing the right deployment models
- Conducting the testing protocol and critical monitoring
- You are responsible for the build and release process
- Managing the user access to resources
- Managing the various branches of code
- Automation of repetitive tasks
- Provide the server support and the application support
- Ensure that the backup is sufficient, and if there isn’t any adequate backup, then you have to create a backup policy as well
DevOps engineer Daily Tasks or Day to Day Activities
If you think about this question, what are a DevOps engineer’s daily tasks or day-to-day activities? This question is pretty much vague in my opinion because it depends on your experience as a DevOps engineer, and it also depends upon the organization you are working for. It really depends on how long your company has started adopting the DevOps practices if you talk about the organization. So let me list down a few general points here that a DevOps engineer does, no matter what their background is and what their experience is. These are some of the common things that generally the majority of the DevOps professionals execute, or they do on a daily basis:
Making Sure Pipeline is Running Smoothly
The first point here is making sure that the pipeline is running smoothly. This is one of the most critical tasks of any DevOps engineer, and they need to make sure that the CI CD pipeline is intact and fixing any issue or failure with it is the topmost priority for such a person. As a result, they often need to spend time on troubleshooting, analysing, and providing fixes to pipeline issues.
Interaction with Teams
The second point here is interaction with other teams. Coordination and collaboration are the keys for a DevOps engineer to be successful, and hence a daily interaction with the DevOps and the QA team, program managers, IT teams, and other stakeholders is always required.
Infrastructure Management
So, the next day-to-day activity of a DevOps engineer is infrastructure management. DevOps engineers are responsible for maintaining and managing the infrastructure required for the CI CD pipeline and making sure that it is up and being executed optimally. So, this is also a part of their daily schedule, such as working on a backup and making sure that the systems are always highly available, a new platform set up, etc.
Automation Backlog
The next point here is working on the automation backlog. So, automation is the soul of DevOps, and so DevOps engineers need to plan it out and spend a lot of time behind the keyboard working on automating stuff on a daily basis. Repetitive and mundane tasks must be automated using the necessary DevOps tools.
Removing the Bottlenecks
The next point here is removing the bottlenecks. DevOps engineers’ primary purpose is to identify the bottlenecks or the manual handshakes and work with everyone involved: the development, QA, and other stakeholders to remove them. So the DevOps engineers spend a good amount of time finding such things and building the automation backlog.
Dealing with Legacy Stuff
Not everyone is lucky to work on the latest, and the newest things, and DevOps engineers are no exception. Hence, they also need to spend time on legacy systems of their organization in terms of supporting it or migrating it to the latest version.
Exploration
Exploration is another daily activity for a DevOps engineer. So, DevOps leverage a lot from the various tools which are available, and there are many options as open source. So, the team needs to regularly check on this to make sure that the adoptions are as required, and this is something which also requires some effort not on a daily basis, but you can say that such activities should be done on a regular basis.
Training and Self Development
Self-learning and training are very useful in getting better understanding, and many organizations encourage their employees to take the time out and do it. And same holds true for DevOps folks as well. So, it is very important to learn something new every day.
Documentation
Documentation is also an essential daily activity. Though agile and DevOps stress less on the documentation, it is still an important part of the job on which a DevOps engineer works on a daily basis, be it server information, daily/weekly charts, or Scrum or Kanban board or simple steps to configure or modify the infrastructure. So, you need to spend a reasonable amount of time coming up with these artifacts.
Continuous Improvement as a Practice
Last but not least task of a DevOps engineer is a continuous improvement as a practice. So, it is up to the DevOps folks to build awareness of the potential of CI CD and DevOps practices and build a culture of leveraging it for doing things better, reducing the rework and increasing productivity, and optimizing the use of existing resources. You must go and talk to people to build DevOps and continuous improvement culture.
Final Thoughts
So that was all about the daily tasks and day-to-day activities of a DevOps engineer. DevOps is the trending domain, and it keeps on growing year on year, so new activities always get added to the DevOps engineer task list. If you follow these activities on a daily basis as a DevOps engineer, you are going to be successful in this field.
