7 Skills To Learn For Becoming A GCP DevOps Engineer In 2023

7 Skills To Learn For Becoming A GCP DevOps Engineer In 2023

Right from higher total compensation to better career advancement opportunities, DevOps has tremendous opportunities to offer. Gartner VP Milind Govekar stated that “there is no business strategy without a cloud strategy. “Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 85% of companies will follow the “cloud-first” principle, and more than 95% of new workloads will be run on “cloud-native” platforms. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) registered a 35% growth in revenue in the last quarter, while GCP’s CFO Ruth Porat said that considerable investments in data centers and servers were made in the recent past. When compared to the older approaches to software development, DevOps enables faster development, deployment, and go-to-market time, leading to greater market adoption. This clearly translates to better opportunities for DevOps engineers in the upcoming times. However, these benefits come with significant challenges for both new and existing DevOps engineers. Thriving in a fast-paced environment where one needs to ensure the security, reliability, and scalability of IT infrastructure and products is getting tougher with new tools, technologies and frameworks frequently entering the landscape. 

Thus, it is necessary to regularly upgrade your skills and stay updated with DevOps trends.Talent500 has created a list of seven must-have skills to learn for becoming a GCP DevOps engineer and boosting your career in 2023. No matter if you are looking to switch your job or make a career in GCP DevOps, this article will help you make the right moves.

Let’s get started:

Why is learning GCP DevOps beneficial to your career?

To begin with, you must fully understand what DevOps achieves for an organization from a financial point of view. An HBR study finds that businesses experience the following benefits by implementing DevOps:

• 64% witnessed improvement in product quality
• 66% of the respondents experienced bottom-line growth 
• 66% of the respondents claimed to have achieved better innovation
• 67% of the firms witnessed increased productivity
• 67% of them experienced better customer relevance 

The same study also confirmed that DevOps was a key driving force behind the success of the larger organization:

Interestingly, Google Cloud finds that it is the large corporations (10,000+ employees) that have implemented DevOps, as they form 22% of the total adopters. Companies having a headcount between 500 to 10,000+ have a 57% share among adopter organizations. Here is the industry-wise breakdown of DevOps adoption:

                                                             (Source: Google Cloud – State of DevOps 2021)

Also, the market’s adoption of DevOps is still lacking as DevOps is used by only 35.9% of the software development teams. A Puppet report finds that only 21% of the surveyed IT leaders identify their team as a “DevOps team” despite an overwhelming 83% of respondents stating that their organization is implementing

DevOps practices:

A Gartner study finds that more than 50% of the respondent organizations state “people issues” as the biggest challenge in expanding their DevOps usage:

With all of these pieces of information put together, it is crystal clear that DevOps is definitely a lucrative career path that will also provide you with a promising trajectory in the long term. Here are the financial prospects of a DevOps engineer as per various reputed sources:

DevOps engineer average base pay as per Builtin: $127,116

DevOps engineer average base pay as per Talent.com: $126,750

DevOps engineer average base pay as per Glassdoor: $110,821

Top 7 Rewarding GCP DevOps Skills

Now that you have a better understanding of what a DevOps career has to offer even if you aren’t in a FAANG organization, let us go through the top seven skills that will help you be at the top of your game as a GCP DevOps engineer:

#1 CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is one of the core aspects of DevOps as it focuses on developing and delivering high-grade software on a consistent basis. CI/CD lays emphasis on making small, incremental changes to the software code to make the process more accessible and simpler in nature. Also, it shortens the Time to Market (TTM) while facilitating quicker bug/failure detection. As a DevOps engineer, a CI/CD pipeline helps automate and monitor the entire SDLC, STLC, and SRE. Popular CI/CD tools include Jenkins, Tekton Pipelines, Spinnaker, Concourse, Screwdriver, and GoCD.

#2 Software Testing 

DevOps trades off software security and integrity for higher velocity, and thus, DevOps engineers should pay extra attention to software testing as compared to other software development approaches. It is noteworthy that many individuals pay less attention to software testing as they feel that development and operations are their only core areas. However, due to the increased velocity, it becomes necessary that DevOps engineers conduct testing in an all-encompassing manner. As a DevOps engineer, you are required to conduct feature verification testing, functional testing, operations testing, functional testing, and continuous testing in the development environment. Popular DevOps software testing tools include Kobiton, Bamboo, mabl, and SoapUI. 

#3 Software Security

As mentioned above, DevOps accelerates coding velocity, and it inherently leads to an increased number of bugs and vulnerabilities. Thus, a GCP DevOps engineer must be familiar with coding best practices that enhance software security and interweave a defensive approach to the whole process. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the cost of cybercrime will rise by 15% per year for the next five years, reaching USD 10.5 Trillion by the year 2025. If not approached correctly from a software security perspective, DevOps adoption might further inflate this figure. Thus, a set of best practices, tools, and a holistic cultural approach towards software security-oriented DevOps called DevOps Security, or DevSecOps, was developed. DevSecOps unites software development (Dev), security (Sec), and IT operations (Ops) to improve a company’s capacity to rapidly and safely release applications and services.

#4 Task Automation 

Automation is the fundamental basis of implementing DevOps as it intends to increase velocity and reduce the bottlenecks faced by IT organizations. Automation is a cohesive part of development, testing, CI/CD, performance monitoring, and configurations, making it a major driver of accelerated velocity. However, automation also boosts code quality along with the overall quality of processes since it minimizes the room for human error and allows resources to focus on more critical tasks. As a GCP DevOps engineer, you must ensure that the maximum possible tasks are automated with the help of tools like Kubernetes, Git, Docker, Raygun, or Splunk.

#5 Mastering Containers

GCP DevOps engineers must have command over containers as they help build, test, and deploy software at a faster pace and add reliability and mutual exclusivity to other containers in a common environment.  Traditionally, interoperability was a major concern for IT organizations as the development and operations teams faced issues such as code not working on their respective system or facing errors. With the help of Docker images or Kubernetes, both development and operations teams can share IT resources through virtualization, thereby eliminating any such conflicts and bringing the two on the same page. The release pipeline configurations are also simplified by a huge margin while the interdependencies among containers are defined through the docker-compose.yml file, i.e., deployment manifest.

#6 Programming, Scripting and Coding 

A GCP DevOps engineer must be proficient in programming technologies like Golang, Perl, Bash, and Ruby, apart from PHP, Java, JavaScript, and Python. This is due to the fact that DevOps engineers need to script in these coding languages to automate development and operations.  This is the bare minimum for a DevOps career because scripting aids in automating processes like assigning DNS code/IP address while also being a part of manual codes. A sound understanding of these programming languages helps write codes in well-defined patterns, which in turn helps manage the flow of an application, setup, installation, and validation for the entire development team. It also ensures that the DevOps engineer can easily manage the development team in order to provide a consistent, error-free flow of the application, setup, installation, and validation.

#7 GCP Design Solution Architecture

Last but not least, the candidate must have a solid understanding of Google Cloud Platform infrastructure components. Without the knowledge of GCP design solution architecture, you won’t be able to design, develop, or handle cloud-native solutions while also exposing the software to cyber threats. Also, when it comes to delivering solutions that fulfill business objectives, a lack of understanding of the Google Cloud Architecture Framework can compromise the security, efficiency, performance, cost-effectiveness, and resilience of the solution. You must have a grip on hybrid cloud concepts, move data to GCP, and configure optimal storage and database options. Also, you must learn to use Google Cloud IAM properly, and it is preferable that you also go through relevant enterprise case studies.

Wrap Up

As visible in the below infographic, DevOps is going to be one of the best career paths for IT professionals in the future:

However, you must also focus on developing soft skills like decision-making, communication, and collaboration, on top of learning how to find relevant jobs. For more insightful blogs on DevOps, subscribe to our newsletter here.