Skilling up in DevOps & the daily rates expected

Patrick Crompton, contract director at eSynergy Solutions, discusses the benefits of DevOps

DevOps is a hybrid of development and operations methods. In general terms it addresses communication and collaboration between development and infrastructure teams. I believe this has arisen because of continuous integration and developing applications in the cloud. The rise in DevOps is due to the need to deliver new apps / content to meet the needs of the customer. IT has finally moved into the front office it seems.

DevOps is about streamlining the delivery and support processes and benefits from standardising environments in order to focus on product delivery, testing, release management and continuous integration and deployment. Many of the ideas and people from DevOps came from Agile software development movements.

Why have I chosen this skill to be in my top 17.5?

• With the focus on cost and speed to market working in a DevOps environment allows you to push continuous deployments out to the market quickly and easily.
• Whether people agree or not we are seeing a big rise in demand for DevOps skills. We are seeing it in the form of continuous integration, collaboration or a focus on testing. It will carry on becoming more prevalent in my opinion.
• The emergence of deploying apps into the cloud with AWS, Google, Heroku etc. is pushing demand for developers to understand infrastructure.
• Whilst culture is key, the advances in CI, CM, SCM platforms have provided a reliable and cost effective mechanism for organisations to automate and streamline their delivery processes to implement CD.

What rates to expect in the next 12 months?

• £300-£450 if you are from a standard development or infrastructure background.
• £400-£550 per day if you have the following skills combined with DevOps: development (Java, Ruby, Python, Scala), platforms such as Linux, Agile, continuous integration and deployment, Cloud (AWS, Google, Heroku) and NoSQL databases.
• £500-£700 per day for the more senior and experienced DevOps engineers with a background in CI, Agile and Cloud technologies.
• £500-£700 per day for those who have real experience of DevOps in the enterprise. environment. Enterprises have been slow to hire teams of DevOps engineers but it is my view that this will pick up.
• We have contractors working on varying rates due to contract length, seniority, skills and number of hours expected 

Jobs advertised

• The number of DevOps jobs advertised in the UK has increased by 200% in 2013.
• Jobs advertised with Chef, Puppet and other build and configuration tools has also rocketed.
• If you include CI, Build and configuration jobs it means this number is even greater.

What skills should you be obtaining in order to get the best possible rates?

• Development languages such as Java, Ruby, Python combined with tools such as Chef and Puppet. If you include skills and experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google, Heroku, OpenStack and Azure you will stand the best chances of obtaining the best rate.
•  Experience of implementing DevOps in an enterprise environment.
• Continuous integration or configuration and release management.

eSynergy Solutions are proud to say we have placed over 50+ DevOps engineers (both contract and permanent teams) so far in 2013. We do not see this as a fad and believe the demand will carry on rising. If you need help understanding the market, rates, salaries or what skills are on the market then get in touch. 

We are holding a DevOps breakfast meetup with Midvision and Opscode on Thursday 14^th November focused on DevOps in enterprise environments.

For further details please call Adele on 0207 444 4085 or email us at joinus@esynergy-solutions.co.uk to secure your place.