Having a DevOps engineer is one of the key ways to implement a DevOps culture in your organization. Before we delve into what a DevOps engineer is and what the role entails, we will start with a definition of DevOps. 

Definition of DevOps 

DevOps brings together the concepts of development and operations, highlighting the collaboration between the two.

The main premise behind a DevOps culture is releasing software frequently in small increments while incorporating any feedback received to constantly improve products.

DevOps relies on continuous testing by developing automated CI/CD pipelines. Thus, the outcome of implementing DevOps is a CI/CD pipeline supported by effective collaboration between development and operations teams.

You can look at DevOps as a combination of people, process and technology that strives to continuously add value to customers through increased and faster ability of an organization to deliver products and services. 

Thus, the main priority of DevOps is to release high quality features on a frequent basis through cross-team collaboration.

Due to the value that DevOps practices bring to teams and customers alike, it is no surprise that there is increasing demand for DevOps professionals.

One of the vital roles within DevOps is the DevOps engineer, a highly desirable and coveted role within organizations implementing modern software practices.

Who is a DevOps engineer?

A DevOps engineer is someone with a deep knowledge of the software development process and lifecycle and has expertise in the various automation tools for developing CI/CD pipelines.

The DevOps engineer, then, is an IT professional who works with developers and IT teams to monitor and facilitate code releases on a CI/CD basis.

You can look at this type of engineer as the bridge that connects development and operations teams. To do so successfully, he/she will have a wide range of knowledge that spans both development and operations.

Consequently, when you have such a profile in your team, you can ensure that your development and operations teams are working smoothly together. 

You can also release updates to your products much quicker as he/she oversees that everything is oriented towards achieving frequent releases, which is at the core of a DevOps approach. 

DevOps engineer skill set

A DevOps engineer requires a good balance between soft and hard skills to successfully implement a DevOps methodology.

The technical skills required will vary depending on the organization, team structures and tools that are available. However, the following are the general set of skills he/she is expected to have:

Communication

As previously mentioned, the DevOps engineer is like a bridge that connects development and operations teams. 

As a result, they will need to have the interpersonal skills necessary to be that bridge and create a collaborative environment. Hence, they should be able to communicate and collaborate effectively across teams and to support and advise colleagues whenever necessary.

Experience with DevOps tools

This goes without saying but to adopt DevOps practices, certain tools should be used so the DevOps engineer will need to have a good understanding of such tools from building to monitoring and operating them.

The DevOps engineer must manage complex automated pipelines. They must also have experience in configuring and deploying CI/CD tools since continuous integration and continuous delivery are at the core of a DevOps culture. 

The engineer will usually need to work closely with the development team to ensure they are using these tools effectively.

Project management

Often, a DevOps engineer is the one who takes the lead on managing all the processes within a project, ensuring smooth communication among everyone working on the project and making sure everyone is clear on their responsibilities and goals.

Optimizing release cycles

In a sense, a DevOps engineer is a representative of a DevOps culture. To maintain such a culture within the organization, he/she will constantly seek ways to optimize and speed-up your release process by introducing new software, for example.

Coding knowledge

A DevOps engineer should have a diverse set of coding skills and a familiarity with a number of programming languages such as Java, Javascript and Ruby.

He/she would then apply these coding skills to construct an efficient automated pipeline or build new tools as part of agile development practices.

Most importantly, he/she will need to be skilled at writing secure code to protect your software from unwanted attacks. This means that they will need to have the security skills necessary to build and design software with security in mind.

Infrastructure knowledge

An important element of DevOps is automation.

This means that a DevOps engineer should have a working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code, a concept which represents modern practices of managing infrastructure so that infrastructure setup is treated as code rather than a manual process.

As a result, they will need to understand how to model system infrastructure in the cloud using provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS’ CloudFormation, Terraform, or related products from Azure Devops and Google Cloud Platform.

The DevOps engineer should also have the ability to design and manage computer ecosystems, whether on-premise or in the cloud.

DevOps engineer responsibilities

The responsibilities of the DevOps engineer will differ depending on the organization but generally speaking and based on the above required skills, his/her main responsibilities include:

• Writing documentation for server-side features
• System analysis of the current system in use and developing plans for enhancements and improvements.
• Cloud deployment and management
• CI/CD management and deployment
• Performance assessment, monitoring and recommending performance enhancements
• Infrastructure management
• Continuous testing at different stages of the development cycle
• Helping to implement a DevOps culture

Some tools used by DevOps engineers

Below you will find a non-exhaustive list of the various automation tools that DevOps engineers use as part of a DevOps methodology across the software delivery lifecycle-from continuous integration environments to deployment:

• Source code management: GitHub
• Developing CI/CD pipelines: CI/CD processes require specific tools for automation. Some widely-used ones include Jenkins and GitLab CI
• Testing: these are tools that will help the engineer determine how the application they built turned out and check for errors. Such tools include Selenium.
• Containerization relies on specific tools to build and configure containers that allow software to function across various environments. Such tools include Docker and Kubernetes, an open-source container-orchestration system.
• Configuration management to manage and configure servers in DevOps. Some tools include Puppet and Chef.
• Monitoring: these are tools to help the engineer to screen the app and to make sure it’s working as it should. Such tools include Nagios and Prometheus.
• Cloud platform integration: cloud is a method for storing information over the web instead of your hard drive. There are many cloud suppliers on the market; the most well known include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

For a more comprehensive list of DevOps tools, you can refer to the Periodic Table of DevOps Tools by Digital.ai.

How much does a DevOps engineer make? 

The role has become a very in-demand job as DevOps practices have become more wide-spread across organizations.

According to talent.com, the average salary of a DevOps engineer in the USA is around $126,957 a year with more experienced engineers making up to $160,000 a year.

Beyond a job title

A DevOps engineer is an important part of your transformation into a DevOps methodology and so will need to have a broad set of skills to bring about this transformation.

They will ensure everyone is working towards the same objective: quick and rapid delivery of high quality code. They do so by ensuring your teams are using the automated tools effectively and opening up lines of communication to ensure a smooth workflow.

Therefore, your DevOps engineer is not only the foundation of your DevOps culture but also a valuable link between different teams that will facilitate collaboration among them, thereby increasing productivity and bringing about the full potential of DevOps to your organization.

One point to remember is that this is a dynamic role in a highly evolving market so this role may grow and change accordingly to include more responsibilities. Thus, having someone with a broad set of skills and knowledge is essential for the success of your organization in an ever-changing industry.

Nowadays, in order to remain competitive in the world of modern software development, teams need to figure out a way to continuously deliver new features without delay.

However, there are times when choosing to go for a big bang release is too risky, especially when you have a new feature that you’re not confident how your customers will react to it.

Luckily, modern teams have a number of progressive roll out options to choose from, where they can still go through with their releases but in a gradual and progressive manner to test initial reactions to these releases and gauge customer interest in them.

Dark launch is one such technique to help you to progressively roll out your features.

What is a dark launch?

A dark launch or dark release is a term that refers to releasing your features to a subset of users to gather their feedback and improve your new features accordingly. Hence, it is a way to deploy a feature but limits access to it to obtain useful feedback.

You can think of it as a safe way to release your features to a small set of users to test whether they like this new feature.

Based on the feedback received from these users, you would either release this feature to the rest of your users or you work on optimizing and improving the feature before doing a full release.

How is it implemented?

Dark launches are often combined with feature flags in order to target certain users with features to test them out. Therefore, feature flags would allow teams to enable new releases for particular users while disabling them for everyone else.

You start the dark launch by first wrapping up the new feature in a feature flag, which helps to decouple deployment from release. You would then push this feature into production by toggling it on for your chosen users, starting with a small percentage of users and then gradually rolling it out to more users.

During a dark launch or dark deployment, feedback is gathered and if any issues come up during this launch, especially if you start receiving negative feedback from your users or errors start showing up in your system, you can easily turn off this feature with the help of feature flags.

Benefits of dark release

More experimentation

Dark launches are a great way to gauge customers’ interest in a new feature you’re planning to release. 

It gives product teams in particular a way to test out their ideas with less risk as only a select number of users are seeing the feature. Teams can choose to run experiments for both front- and back-end features and then release the winning variation to everyone else.

This will allow them to move forward with new features and discard the ones that performed poorly. This way, these teams are fully confident that their features meet customer needs and ensure their satisfaction.

Higher quality releases and faster time to market

Such a technique allows you to put forward high-quality releases as you are updating your features according to feedback from your most relevant users. It allows developers to see how users respond to and interact with the new features to determine whether any improvements will need to be made.

Thus, a dark launch is a way to test your new feature in a production environment with real-world users. This way, you’ll be able to gather essential metrics to analyze feature performance and closely monitor how your users engage with the feature.

Such feedback will also allow you to find any bugs you may have missed in previous rounds of testing so that they can be fixed before releasing to a wider audience.

The real value of dark launches is that you achieve faster feedback loops with customers for your new features resulting in faster time-to-market to allow you to remain competitive in a fast-paced market.

It also helps to maintain the momentum of continuous delivery especially as it is important now more than ever to quickly roll out new features to your users and get their feedback.

What’s more, once you release your feature to all users, you’re fully confident that you’re only releasing high quality, bug-free features.

Reduced risk

Another major advantage is that you are reducing risks that come with releasing new features and minimizing their impact because you are only allowing a small group out of all your users to access your new features. 

In this sense, dark launches are a safe way to test new features in a production environment instead of opting for a separate staging environment which can be costly and use up resources.

With feature flags, you can further mitigate risk and be even more confident that you’re fully in control of who sees and doesn’t see your new features. In case anything goes wrong, you can easily roll back the feature by simply turning the flag off.

However, be careful when implementing dark launches using feature flags which may lead to technical debt, especially if your flags are not managed properly over time. You will need to make sure that you have an efficient feature flag management system such as AB Tasty’s server-side functionality that offers dedicated features to keep your flags under control.

Dark launch vs other methods of progressive delivery

You might be wondering what is the difference between this method and other progressive delivery methods such as canary deployments or ring deployments.

The objectives of such types of releases are the same, which is to gradually and progressively release new features to a small subset of users, letting you test the waters to make sure they work properly before releasing them to everyone else.

One major difference is that canary deployments are usually done on all releases of your app and not just individual features and can be used to, for example, slowly transition to a new infrastructure while dark launches allow you to test features on the front-end before rolling it out to everyone else.

However, when you use feature flags, you will be able to perform a dark launch for infrastructure migrations to upgrade your tech stack as well as test back-end features in production.

Furthermore, a dark launch isn’t usually something users opt-into and the new feature isn’t pointed out to them, hence why we refer to such a launch as ‘dark’.

If you want to give users a choice and allow them to opt-in, you can ask a limited number of users to sign up to test a new product. This is also referred to as beta testing.

Therefore, because dark launches are not necessarily beta tests, you must be careful that you are releasing a good enough feature since these users will be less tolerant of any issues that arise during testing.

However, these two terms are sometimes used interchangeably as canary deployments can be considered as a type of ‘dark launch’ that specifically targets a beta group and is based more on a percentage rollout to users.

You will also need to make sure that you have enough users to pick from since dark launches require a considerable user base to get sufficient feedback so this is not a technique suited for new apps.

To sum up

Dark launches are a good way to ensure the efficacy of your future releases through real-world feedback and to maintain the stability of your app infrastructure, allowing you to deliver faster and higher quality products to your customers.

Using feature flags to perform a dark launch is a way to accelerate the release process while minimizing the blast radius and mitigating the risk of new releases.