Preparing to Fit in a DevOps Career World: Trainings and Certifications For Developers—On the Operations Side of the House

By David Geer

42% of IT pros surveyed had adopted or planned to adopt DevOps development approaches according to InformationWeek’s DevOps Survey. That number grew with 66% of U.S. companies using DevOps approaches by the time of a Rackspace survey only ten months later. With the DevOps way of doing things clearly taking over the coder’s realm, most programmers will eventually have to yield to and master this mindset.

But what does DevOps mean for their profession?

DevOps approaches introduce developers to operational requirements and the tools and methods necessary to ensure that the code they create is immediately functional, of high quality, and fit for the production environment. With solid training in these tools and methods, developers should find their talents highly saleable in a career world that is increasingly favorable to DevOps practitioners.

CyberCoders took a look at some of the key DevOps tools and trainings for programmers who want to stretch their skillsets into the future.

Tools and Skills

Important developer skills for DevOps environments include automating configuration management, a.k.a. infrastructure lifecycle management using vendor-neutral tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, and Docker, says Adam Gordon, CTO of New Horizon Computer Learning Centers of South Florida.

These tools integrate with a host of popular platforms and software including Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services, CFEngine, Cisco, Eucalyptus, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, Jelastic, Jenkins, Linux (various distributions), Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, OpenSVC, Rackspace, Rightscale, Salt, SoftLayer, Vagrant, VMware, and a rapidly expanding number of examples.

Some of the most popular vendor-specific DevOps platforms include those from Microsoft and VMware, says Gordon. Microsoft’s DevOps-related products include System Center with its System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). These Microsoft developer tools enable functions such as automated configuration management, monitoring, and custom management pack development. VMware tools such as vCloud Air (vCloud Hybrid Service) bridge the VMware development platform to tools such as Puppet and Chef, according to Gordon, while the vRealize cloud management platform automates infrastructure and application delivery, monitoring, analytics, and management.

Finally, Red Hat Linux developers will find that learning to deploy this distribution can be useful for work in Red Hat-related DevOps environments.

Trainings and Certifications

Each of the below vendors offer training in their products if not also certification. For vendor-neutral configuration management training, visit:

• Puppet

• Chef

• Ansible

• SaltStack

• Docker

These opportunities include online and instructor lead education, training materials, and webinars.

For Microsoft DevOps training information, surf through these links below:

• https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/system-center-training.aspx

• https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/default.aspx

• https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/certification-overview.aspx

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/devops/

• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/development-operations.aspx

Some Microsoft Azure training may also prove helpful for this platform. These trainings include training centers, classes, and preparation materials.

For VMware DevOps training data, see below. These trainings include certification roadmaps and other resources:

• http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/certification/

• http://vcloud.vmware.com/service-offering/devops.

For Red Hat, see certification and training offers toward the Red Hat Certified Engineer designation at http://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/rhce.