What to do if you don't have enough DevOps expertise

Now commonly used in development teams, the DevOps movement emerged in the early 2000s when IT operations and development teams expressed concern about the traditional model. In the past, development and operations were separated. Developers wrote the code, and system administrators were responsible for deploying and integrating it. Communication between these two silos was limited, and specialists from each domain worked separately on the same project.

A contraction of "development" (Dev) and "operations" (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, processes, technologies and tools that aim to improve a company's ability to deliver applications and services at a high rate, in a process of continuous improvement.

This is where the job of devOps engineer comes in, a highly sought-after expert, halfway between software developer and system administrator.

According to the latest 2021 Enterprise DevOps Skills Report from Upskilling and the DevOps Institute, DevOps is no longer a question of whether organizations need it or not, but rather of when to adopt it. There are several major problems: recruiting and/or training DevOps engineers, and the question of their workload.

Difficult recruitment, costly training on a regular basis

Even more than other professions, devOps engineers need to be Swiss Army knives, which makes recruitment and training no easy task.

Recruiting companies require a wide range of skills such as :

• Systems management expertise ("Sysadmin")
• Programming skills (in several languages, JavaScript, Python, etc.)
• Knowledge of the software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Technical ability to set up an infrastructure adapted to microservices
• Expertise in managing on-premise infrastructure, on a cloud provider or even several cloud providers
• The desire to keep abreast of new technologies
• An understanding of Quality Assurance (QA) processes

In addition, DevOps engineers need soft skills such as leadership, communication, collaboration, empathy and problem-solving. It can be difficult to cultivate these skills if you're not already in an organization that uses a DevOps model.

Traditionally, "must-have" skills include technical skills and knowledge, secondly automation and thirdly interpersonal skills. However, since the pandemic, automation has moved to the top of the skills list, with soft skills coming second and technical skills third. This comes as no surprise, as the shift to teleworking implies greater automation of workflows with the company and within IT to minimize the risk inherent in manual tasks and processes.

Nowadays, it has also become essential in devOps to understand how cloud computing platforms work, modern computing technologies such as microservices and containers... because until now, there were no alternatives. These new technologies not only improve digital transformation, but also enable efficient management and business development.

But what if you don't have the skills in-house?

According to the latest 2021 Enterprise DevOps Skills Report from Upskilling and the DevOps Institute, half of those surveyed are looking to recruit and train DevOps skills in-house first, before turning to external recruitment.

If in-house training isn't possible, you'll have to recruit or call on external skills from digital service companies (ESN).

Unfortunately, DevOps engineer profiles are very hard to recruit (Tech Hiring Survey, 2022 | CodinGame and CoderPad) and teams face many challenges according to the Upskilling 2021 report:

• 64% have difficulty finding competent DevOps talent
• 57% find it difficult to identify the DevOps skills they need
• 41% have difficulty attracting DevOps talent

For training courses recommended and certified by AWS Training and Certification:
AWS Technical Essentials - 780€ HT (1 day)
Development on AWS - 2 390€ HT (3 days)
Systems Operations on AWS - 2 395€ HT (3 days)
AWS : Advanced Development on Amazon Web Services - 2 350€ HT (3 days)
DevOps Engineering on AWS - 2 390€ HT (3 days)

Across the IT industry, DevOps is consistently one of the fastest-growing and highest-value areas of the profession. This demand is spreading rapidly across many roles and sectors. In fact, if nothing changes, over the next five years, the need for DevOps skills is set to increase by 122%, making it one of the fastest-growing skills in the entire profession.

The implementation of a DevOps system includes important actions such as :

DevOps means a heavy workload

• implementation of automation, which eliminates human error and improves productivity over the long term
• CI/CD optimization, to reduce the cost and time required to bring a feature to production
• management of multiple environments (staging, test, production, etc.) as the application becomes more complex
• implementation of DevSecOps (security) from the start of development (where possible) and its maintenance collection
• data monitoring and analysis to improve processes and performance
• reducing technical debt to improve the deployment and long-term quality of functionalities
• provisioning of cloud resources for dev teams requesting and obtaining resources from suppliers, via server purchases and overall management of cloud infrastructure, etc.

Unfortunately, the time DevOps engineers spend on infrastructure (provisioning, deployment, cloud selection and management, etc.) inevitably reduces the time spent on product development and enhancement (automation, CI/CD, data analysis, etc.).

When a company invests DevOps human resources in one or more cloud providers, it is investing in the cloud provider, not in its own product.

Now, is there a way to solve these problems?

Yes, and here are some solutions that could be useful for your business:

> Reduce your DevOps workload by adopting a new concept: Containers-as-a-Services

A CaaS is an operating system for running containers and providing cloud resources. A CaaS is a kind of middleware that connects the various microservices components of your application to their instances. It facilitates application development, deployment and management by providing tools for creating cloud-native applications at the container level. CaaS lets developers concentrate on writing code, rather than managing cloud infrastructure or worrying about scalability and performance issues.

CaaS reduces the entire DevOps infrastructure workload to zero by providing :

Flexibility: CaaS lets you simply run your applications on any type of infrastructure, whether bare-metal, virtual machines, public or private clouds, hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures or containers. This means you can instantly scale your applications up or down as needed, without worrying about compatibility issues between your code and the base infrastructure.

Scalability: with CaaS, you can scale at container and/or application level. If a single instance of an application fails, all the containers associated with it are not destroyed. Instead, the application can be quickly restarted on another instance while retaining its state, so that users suffer no downtime.

Efficiency: CaaS is more efficient because it requires less infrastructure and has more granularity than PaaS, saving you money on your cloud computing costs. And because it's easier to use, you won't have to pay for management, maintenance or support either. And because CaaS doesn't require Kubernetes, you won't have to pay for all the extra resources needed to master Kubernetes - resources that could be better used elsewhere in your business!

> Reduce your DevOps workload by adopting a new concept: Containers-as-a-Services

The expertise needed to provision and deploy your application on a cloud resource is expensive and hard to find. I've already found that it takes around €140k in order to train a small DevOps team of 6 people on a single cloud provider. So, if you don't have that in-house, you might need to go through ScaleDynamics CaaS which works with all cloud providers, and doesn't require any training on any provider.

With ScaleDynamics, you have the freedom to modify, backtrack, change geographical regions and reduce overcapacity with maximum simplicity.

Your team will be equipped and ready to focus on developing customer features. You can refocus your team's training on improving your product, not on cloud providers or DevOps tasks.