DevOps is a culture, a mindset, and a strategy that organizations employ to bring the development, operations, and other IT teams to work together in collaboration throughout the software development cycle. DevOps is anchored on practices and tools that help engineering teams deliver high-quality software and services faster and more reliably. Such practices include:
- CI/CD – In DevOps, the software is developed, tested, monitored, and released iteratively in small cycles. Small updates of the software are developed and then continuously integrated and delivered into the production pipeline. This way teams deliver code frequently, faster, safely, and reliably.
- Communication and collaboration. DevOps breaks the barriers that once existed between development and operations teams to create a more interactive, collaborative, and accountable environment. This core practice lays a solid foundation in the adoption of DevOps.
- Automation. Automation of the software delivery process (the infrastructure and workflows) increases the ability of a team to continuously deliver updates, monitor the application’s performance, as well as, pick up and resolve issues faster.
Continuous integration (CI) is the most important aspect of DevOps. In CI, code changes from different developers are integrated frequently into the central repository. The build and test phases that follow are automated to achieve continuous delivery (CD). Automation of the CI/CD pipeline has the following advantages
- Discovering and fixing bugs faster
- Ensure the delivery of high-quality software
- Shorter release times for software updates
The DevOps process makes use of a combination of technologies in developing automated CI/CD pipelines including version control, automation testing, containerization, configuration management, and continuous monitoring tools. One of the most important and popular tools used for CI automation is Jenkins. As such, professionals involved in designing and developing CI/CD pipelines should consider acquiring Jenkins training.
What is Jenkins and how is it used?
Jenkins is an open-source server for continuous integration. It is written in the Java programming language. Jenkins comes with numerous plugins for building, testing, deploying software development projects continuously. It also facilitates the automation of these processes. This way, integrating code changes into the main repository becomes easy and seamless for developers.
An advantage that Jenkins has over others is that it is versatile. It can be used both as a building an integration server as well as an automation tool. Secondly, whichever way it is used, it integrates with other build, document, test, package, deploy, and other technologies to accelerate processes within the software development cycle.
Thanks to a large number of plugins that Jenkins has, the integration of other technologies at various stages of the DevOps process is quite easy and fast. With continuous integration, Jenkins makes it easy to spot faults in the code base and fix them.
Jenkins features
- It is an open-source tool with vibrant community support
- Has more than 1000 plugins for easy integration with other technologies
- It is built using Java language hence it is compatible with all operating systems; Linux, macOS, and Windows.
- Available as a WAR file and so installs and runs very easily onto systems
- Jenkins can be set up and configured online thanks to its web interface
- Facilitates real-time testing and reporting within the CI/CD pipeline
For these reasons, Jenkins has grown to become the favorite continuous integration tool for software engineers. Along with DevOps technology, the DevOps Jenkins Engineer role is one of the most highly demanded.
Who is a DevOps Jenkins Engineer?
To understand the role of a Jenkins engineer, we first need to understand the role of DevOps engineers.
DevOps engineer is a core role among developers and in the overall IT department. He is the person that oversees all the processes in a DevOps project or software development cycle. As such, he coordinates the development, operations, and all other IT staff who are in any way linked to software development. Usually, a DevOps engineer will transition from a developer role or a sysadmin role. He should be well versed with coding, scripting, build and deploy operations, and network functions.
A DevOps Jenkins engineer, then, is a software engineer with a strong bias toward working with Jenkins technology. This would mean that he has worked with several other technologies but mastered Jenkins enough to specialize in it.
DevOps Jenkins Engineer Job Description
The DevOps Jenkins engineer is tasked with steering and supporting the engineering team in building and maintaining dedicated Jenkins CI/CD pipelines for the secure development of applications using DevOps.
Education
The most required education qualification for a DevOps engineer (or any software engineer) is a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or other related fields.
Some recruiters may ask for a master’s degree.
Experience
The years of experience that a recruiter would look for varies greatly depending on the company that is recruiting. However, most recruiters will be keen on candidates with experience in software engineering specifically in DevOps.
General qualifications
- Experience developing reliable CI/CD pipelines
- Experience writing programs using high-level languages like Python, Ruby, Golang, Java, JavaScript and scripting in PHP, Perl
- Experience working with Microsoft or Unix/Linux operating systems
- Cloud-hosted services experience in Amazon Web Services(AWS), Google Cloud, or Azure
Specific qualifications
- Continuous integration using Jenkins technology coupled with the tools related to it like GitHub repository, Octopus, Nexus, Git
- Vast experience working with DevOps configuration management and automation tools like Chef and Puppet.
- Build and release automation experience with Jenkins and AWS or other cloud services
- Experience deploying and monitoring code
- Experience using Git and artifact repositories like Nuget
Key Responsibilities
The key responsibility of a DevOps Jenkins engineer is to support the automation of DevOps tasks within the CI/CD pipeline including builds, tests, deployments, and security scans.
Some common roles of the DevOps Jenkins engineer include:
- Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain CI/CD systems, workflow applications, and other infrastructure using Jenkins.
- Build and deliver new software features to streamline operations or scale infrastructure to meet growing demand and improve performance.
- Prototype, develop, and implement software integrations based on user requirements
- Implement cloud computing capabilities for deploying upgrades
- Choose and implement tools and technologies in the CI/CD pipeline for building and supporting DevOps software development according to the needs of the customer.
- Creating automation scripts with Jenkins and support users of the scripts
- Identify low-level and critical issues within the CI/CD pipeline and conduct analyses.
- Develop and improve DevOps and Jenkins best practices and procedures and educate others on the same.
- Perform risk management, clustering, and load balancing tasks on a DevOps Jenkins CI/CD pipeline
- Conduct security scans as well as performance and availability checks in the CI/CD pipeline.
Required Skills
- Programming and scripting knowledge in Java, Python, .Net, JavaScript, Ruby, Shell, and Bash languages
- Working knowledge of Unix/Linux, Windows, and macOS operating systems
- Understanding of large-scale servers and cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Knowledge of Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB, Oracle, and/or Elasticsearch database systems
- Knowledge of configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef
- Working knowledge of source code version control tools
- Working with load balancers like Netscaler, Ngnix, HAproxy
- Strong communication skills
- Complex problem solving and analytical skills
- Team player
Tools the DevOps Jenkins Engineer will interact with
- Jenkins
- Git Labs
- Jira
- Microsoft Azure
- MS Build
- C#, .Net, Java
- Node.js and Angular
Conclusion
There are more tools and technologies that the DevOps Jenkins engineer will work within the course of duty. While he is not expected to be familiar with all of them, he should align his working knowledge to the mix of tools and technologies employed in his company and also be open to learning other tools and emerging technologies. This way he will be better placed to recommend and implement the best technologies in the CI/CD pipeline for his clients.
