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DevOps is a product and software development approach that emphasizes communication, collaboration, integration, and automation. It helps organizations improve their ability to build and release products and features quickly and efficiently.
If you are looking for a way to improve your business’ agility, then DevOps training may be the answer.
In this blog post, we will discuss the different types of DevOps training available and how to choose the best certification for you. We will also explore how recommended training can help your business achieve its goals.
Let’s get started!
Is DevOps the same as Agile?
The terms Agile and DevOps are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same.
Agile represents a product development methodology, while DevOps is a culture and set of practices that enable the agile methodology.
The goal of the DevOps movement is to improve communication and collaboration between developers and operations professionals to shorten the product delivery cycle.
This can be done by breaking down silos within an organization and implementing automation wherever possible.
Why should a business consider DevOps?
Recent research has discovered that nearly 100% of companies implementing DevOps over the past few years are satisfied with the results.
Some of the most notable improvements include:
- Producing more high-quality deliverables (61% of companies)
- Accelerated time to market and increased deployment frequency (49%)
- Improved team culture (48%)
- Faster recovery times (47%)
- The Lower failure rate of new releases (40%) and more
All of these are a direct result of the cultural and process changes that come with DevOps. These statistics are incredibly compelling when you consider the potential value a business could gain by implementing DevOps.
But let’s explore some of these benefits in a little more detail to see how DevOps training will impact your organization.
DevOps Training Benefits
Once you start training your team in DevOps practices, you will see a number of positive changes both in the work culture and in the business as a whole.
Better communication and collaboration
It is no secret that communication breakdowns are common when the operations and development teams are separated. This often leads to finger-pointing and a general mistrust between the two departments.
DevOps brings these teams together by breaking down silos and implementing cross-functional teams. When everyone is working towards the same goal, communication becomes more open and efficient. The result is a team that trusts each other and can work together more cohesively.
Through DevOps training, your team will learn how to collaborate and communicate effectively with each other. This will lead to a more productive work environment and improved business results.
Faster time to market and increased deployment frequency
This improved communication and collaboration also leads to a higher deployment frequency and faster time to market. Not only that, but the DevOps culture of automation and continuous integration allows you to push new changes into production quickly.
DevOps courses emphasize the importance of automation and how it can speed up the deployment process. As your team becomes more comfortable with DevOps practices, they will automate more tasks. leading to even faster deployments.
Your clients and customers will appreciate the faster turnaround times, and you will be able to stay competitive in an ever-changing marketplace.
Higher quality products
What is the end goal of any company? What should be the number one priority for any business?
The answer is simple: to produce high-quality products that meet customer’s needs. And this is what DevOps enables you to do.
DevOps focuses on the customer by breaking down silos and implementing cross-functional teams. This collaborative DevOps environment makes it easy for developers and operations professionals to work together and quickly create solutions that meet customer demands.
The DevOps concepts of Continuous Learning and Continuous Improvement also come into play here. They help ensure that the team is always working towards improving the quality of their products.
Learning faster and better than your competitors will set you apart in the industry. And DevOps training and certification will help your team do just that.
Increased resilience and scalability
Lastly, all agile companies have turned to agile to overcome problems faster and easier. The better the systems are, the less likely they will arise (or at least the easier they are to overcome when they do).
The DevOps culture of automation, continuous monitoring, and testing help you build a more resilient system. By automating tasks and having a comprehensive monitoring solution in place, you can quickly identify and fix any issues that may arise.
This also leads to increased scalability. As your company grows, you will be able to easily add more resources without worrying about the impact on your system.
DevOps training provides your team with the skills they need to build a more resilient and scalable system. This will enable your company to grow successfully.
Barriers to Implementing DevOps
Even though DevOps brings a lot of benefits to the table, there are some barriers that might make its adoption challenging. Studies show that, even though organizations are happy about the results they get from DevOps, about 85% had issues in the implementation process.
The main barriers to adopting DevOps are:
- Lack of employee skills – is the number one reason for failure in DevOps adoption. As we’ve seen, DevOps requires many new skills, such as collaboration, communication, and automation. If your team doesn’t have the necessary skills, they will struggle to implement DevOps successfully.
- Legacy infrastructure – Many organizations are still using legacy infrastructure, meaning that they have ancient established systems that are difficult to change or update. This can be a major roadblock when trying to implement DevOps practices.
- Difficulty in changing corporate culture – One of the goals of DevOps is to break down silos and promote collaboration. However, this can be difficult in organizations with a corporate culture based on hierarchies and secrecy.
- Lack of leadership support – Finally, it will be very difficult for your team to implement DevOps successfully without strong leadership support. The leaders need to be on board with the new changes and provide the necessary resources for success.
Despite these barriers, with the right training and support, your team can overcome any obstacle and successfully implement DevOps.
Types of DevOps Training
There are plenty of DevOps courses you can choose from, but not all of them are equal.
So, what are the different types of DevOps training?
To make things easier for you, we will divide some of the most popular and sought-after certifications into three categories:
- For developing the Lean-Agile mindset
- For learning DevOps foundations
- More advanced DevOps studies
Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, just an opportunity for you to get started somewhere.
Developing a Lean-Agile mindset
To ensure that you won’t be lost or confused in the sea of DevOps tools and techniques, you must start with developing a Lean-Agile mindset.
This way, you will understand and apply the concepts taught in any DevOps training course. The following certifications will help you do just that:
- Agile Fundamentals – With the broadest target audience, this training is for anyone who wants to understand the basics of agile. This will give you a strong foundation on which to build more advanced DevOps concepts. You don’t have to be a software developer to take this course – it is also suitable for business people, managers, and executives who want to talk about agile with developers and understand the value that it brings.
- Agility In The Enterprise – Adopting Agile methods on an enterprise level is difficult. This course is designed for agile coaches, team facilitators, and others who want to understand and apply agile in their entire organization. It covers topics such as change management, scaling agile, team dynamics, and more.
- Agile Programming – Meant for software developers, programmers, technical team leads, development managers, and similar, this certification teaches how to apply agile concepts in software development. You will learn about product management, configuration management, user stories, test-driven development, and more.
- Agile Software Design – Another great option to help you embrace Agile in IT, this training is for software engineers, designers, and developers who want to create systems that are easy to maintain and modify. You will learn about creating modular designs, design thinking, rapid prototyping, and more.
With a firm hold on the Lean-Agile mindset, you will be ready to move on the DevOps foundations.
Learning DevOps foundations
Start with some beginner courses to learn more about what DevOps is and how it works. These courses will give you a basic understanding of the concepts and terminology involved in DevOps.
- ICAgile Foundations Of DevOps – Created by the International Consortium of Agile, the Foundations of DevOps course is a beginner-level certification covering basic DevOps concepts. The course focuses on the concepts such as the CI/CD pipeline, automation, testing, security, organizational design for DevOps, and similar. It is ideal for team members, managers, and anyone interested in learning about DevOps fundamentals.
- SAFe DevOps – If you’d like to learn DevOps through the lens of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), then the SAFe DevOps course is perfect for you. It will teach you how to apply DevOps principles in a SAFe environment. It covers topics such as value stream mapping and optimization, Lean and Agile development, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Deployment (CD), the CALMR approach to DevOps, and more.
- DevOps Foundation – This DevOps Institute course provides an overview of the DevOps methodology and its goals. It covers topics such as the history of DevOps, culture and organization, systems thinking, measurement, and more. The course is designed for team members and managers who are new to DevOps or want to better understand the concepts involved.
With any of these training options, it won’t take long before you’re ready to move on to learning about the tools and techniques involved in DevOps.
Advanced DevOps courses
These courses will help you automate your workflow and improve collaboration between team members. They will guide you through DevOps implementation in your organization.
- ICAgile Implementing DevOps – The second step in the ICAgile DevOps learning path, this course is for team leads, managers, and executives who want to implement DevOps in their organization. You will learn about the different aspects of a successful DevOps transformation, such as cloud computing and virtualization, designing a deployment pipeline, defining processes and practices, and more.
- ICAgile Expert In DevOps – The last stop on the ICAgile DevOps journey is the Expert in DevOps certification. This course is for architects, engineers, and managers who want to become industry experts in the field of DevOps. You need to have at least six months of experience working with DevOps practices. This course will teach you about topics such as creating a culture of collaboration, designing an architecture for scale, implementing performance monitoring and optimization, and more.
- Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert – This certification is for those already proficient at using the Azure cloud platform to design, build, deploy, and manage applications and services through DevOps practices. You will solidify your Microsoft Azure DevOps knowledge by learning about topics such as developing an instrumentation strategy, defining and implementing Continuous Integration, facilitating communication and collaboration, and more.
- DevOps Leader – Lastly, you might want to look into the DevOps Leader certification from the DevOps Institute. This certification is for managers and executives who want to be responsible for implementing DevOps in their organization. To earn this cert, you must pass a certification exam that covers topics such as the business value of DevOps, culture and changes management, team dynamics, problem-solving, and more.
After completing a series of DevOps certifications, you will be able to effectively lead a team in their journey to adopt and implement DevOps practices.
How to choose a certification for your business needs
While it may be relatively clear where you should begin in terms of the DevOps skill level of your employees and organization as a whole, you might still be experiencing some hesitation when it comes time to choose the right certification.
First and foremost, you need to ask yourself a series of questions that will help you better understand your business needs:
- What are the goals of our DevOps initiative?
- Which tools and technologies do we want to use?
- Who will be responsible for managing the DevOps transformation?
- Do we have the staff and resources to undergo training and certification?
After answering these questions, you can begin looking at individual certifications that will help you meet your goals.
Here are some further points you might want to consider:
- Framework-based vs. framework-neutral training
You have probably noticed that some of the certifications presented in our list were based on a specific framework, such as the SAFe DevOps training. While these frameworks provide a wealth of knowledge and can be extremely beneficial, they might not always be the best fit for your organization.
If you’re looking for a more general certification that is not tied to any particular framework, then you might want to consider ICAgile’s certifications. This entire DevOps learning track is framework-neutral and covers various topics that are essential to successful DevOps implementations.
- Online vs. on-premises training
In these uncertain times of an ongoing global pandemic, this dilemma might be a no-brainer for you. Still, it would be a mistake not to mention both the option of DevOps online training and on-premises training.
Both online and on-premises DevOps courses have their pros and cons, but we believe that the advantages of a DevOps online course are hard to overlook. You and your teams don’t have to travel, and the lessons are often more affordable.
That said, on-premises training can be a great choice if you want more face-to-face interaction or need access to specific tools and DevOps technology that are not available online.
- Certification renewal policies
Lastly, whichever certification you choose, you should know that it likely won’t be valid forever. Most certificates require renewal every few years (or less) to maintain your credential.
Be sure to read and understand the renewal policy of any certification you are interested in so that you can plan accordingly.
Conclusion
The importance of DevOps certification training cannot be overstated. By implementing DevOps practices, businesses can realize several benefits, such as improved collaboration, increased efficiency, and enhanced security.
The DevOps certifications in this guide represent some of the best options available for training your employees in DevOps practices and helping them become true DevOps professionals. We hope that you will find the perfect fit for your organization’s needs.
Don’t forget to consider what level your employees should start their DevOps training. Do you have a team of greenhorn developers? Or are your sysadmins already well-versed in automation? Depending on where your organization is starting, the answer to this question might vary.
Consider whether you want to explore DevOps within a specific framework or go with a more general certification. And finally, be sure to renew your certificates as necessary to maintain compliance and keep up with the latest changes in the industry.
If you’re looking to get started with DevOps or want to increase your team’s proficiency, look no further. Please take a look at our upcoming courses or contact us for more information on how we can help you achieve your DevOps goals. We guarantee that you won’t be disappointed!
