DevOps

Skills and certification around the DevOps industrial complex

                       

DevOps Certifications

There are several organizations providing (overlapping) certification exams and training based on DevOps:

The DASA (DevOps Compentence Association) defined its 6 principles of DevOps and has a 24 question QuickScan for you to self-assess your own level in each of the 12 (4 skill areas and 8 knowledge) areas of their DevOps Compentence Model :

PROTIP: Questions in the QuickScan contain statements about what each person can actually do to reach the highest levels in each area (such as being proactive vs. reactive, on a daily basis, inside and outside the organization, etc.). These statements are gold because they make the DevOps journey real. Make an appointment with yourself to review these statements once a week to document proof of how you personally are achieving them.

          Business Value Optimization: Use of the IT service in real life, including direct feedback loop of user comments to team, service level management, definition of done, business activity/performance monitoring, business case management:

1. I am aware of the organizational goals and objectives and I constantly ensure that requested features align with goals and objectives.

2. I have intimate knowledge. I have proven experience with (supporting) the business process.

   Business Analysis: Evangelism, coaching, self-confidence, proactivity, reflection, trust, open discussions, experimentation, fail fast, courage to change:

3. I have proven experience of structuring and organizing requirements, using techniques to specify and model requirements and facilitating refinement meetings.

4. I proactively collect feedback and communicate it with the team through a structured method. I have well developed communication, facilitation, and negotiation skills.

   Architecture and Design: Ensuring fit between developments and current situation, overall service design, patterns & styles:

5. Extensive Knowledge - Within the team, I ensure that architecture guidelines and rules are followed and that feedback is proactively given to Enterprise Architectural guidelines and rules.

6. Extensive knowledge - I extensively understand the Current State Architecture and the team maintains the Current State Architecture.

   Test specification: Design of test cases, test concepts:

7. I have proven experience with all listed types of testing.

8. I have proven experience with setting up, using, and maintaining automated testing.

   Programming: Software engineering mastery, everything as code, data management:

9. I have considerable experience in developing software and I can apply best practices to the software I develop.

10. (I have) 6 or more years of experience (writing code from scratch, using: i.e. common architectural patterns (MVC, SOA, etc.); software design patterns (i.e. Facade, Abstract factory, etc.); common frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, etc.)

    Continuous Delivery: Automated testing, deployment and release management, configuration management, version control, cloud, containerization, featuredriven delivery:

11. I have extensive knowledge and experience (of version control).

12. I have proven expertise (of the continuous delivery process and setting up an automated pipeline for deployments)

    Infrastructure engineering: Technical monitoring, performance management (e.g. load balancing etc.), capacity and availability management, reliability engineering, cloud, containerization:

13. I have proven experience and I am able to guide others (with technical monitoring of infrastructure components).

14. I have proven experience with availability and capacity management.

    Security, Risk, and Compliance: Security, service continuity planning:

15. I apply secure coding standards and practices in my work and educate my colleagues on alternatives in case insecure coding practices are identified.

16. I take responsibility for security, risk & compliance within my team. Security, risk & compliance are fully integrated in the way we deliver services.

    Courage: Evangelism, coaching, self-confidence, proactivity, reflection, trust, open discussions, experimentation, fail fast, courage to change:

17. I take actions in most situations because I am trusted to do so based on my knowledge and experience.

18. I encounter the unexpected situations with full confidence and work to fix them in a structured way. Also, I coach others in becoming more aware of unexpected situations.

    Team Building: Understand the other’s point of view, collaboration, mutual accountability, common purpose, ability to integrally support the service/product:

19. I actively seek cooperation to share knowledge and experience and I help others to do the same.

20. No problem (taking over the role of others in the team). I have experience in multiple roles and I help my team members to achieve the same.

    DevOps Leadership: Facilitating teams to high performance, humility, transparency, Service lifecycle mindset, Stakeholder management:

21. I structurally stimulate others inside and outside the team to reflect and take ownership for the results.

22. I involve my team members when I need to take a decision and I stimulate others in my team to act in the same way.

    Continuous Improvement: Today we do our work better than yesterday, kaizen mindset, quality at the source, first time right, knowledge-sharing, ability to adapt:

23. I actively look for problems/impediments, discuss them in the team and take action to solve them with a structured problem-solving method on a daily basis.
24. Yes, I reserve explicit time and structurally plan for improvement activities regardless of the situation.

The results are rotated and mixed up from their model diagram:

DASA speaks of 7 exams in their DASA certification scheme implemented by iSQLI (which also handles ISQTB QA, Lean Six Sigma, and other certifications).

The elegant Deborah Burton in the Netherlands is the Executive Director. [SlideShare]

CAUTION: As a “black box” approach, DAST cannot identify non-reflective vulnerabilities (i.e – Cross-Site Scripting) that don’t generate feedback when triggered.

International DevOps Certification Academy

• devops-certification.org (non-profit International DevOps Certification Academy) provides up to 10 free retakes and a verification portal for those to prove that they passed online exams of 50 multiple-choice over 60 minutes. The cost of $99 - $249 which include access to a 43-page PDF and training videos. Their certs:

  • DevOps-GEN $99 Generalist
  • DevOps-EXEC $249 Executive
  • DevOps-PM $199 Project Manager

  • DevOps-PO $199 Product Owner

  • DevOps-ARCH $149 Architect
  • DevOps-DEV $149 Developer
  • DevOps-OPS $149 Operations Engineer
  • DevOps-QA $149 Quality Assurance Engineer
  • DevOps-SEC $149 Information Security Engineer

  • DevOps-RM $149 Release Manager

  • DevOps-TRA $199 Trainer
  • DevOps-COA $199 Coach
    
    

  Comments on Quora are positive. But all of them were posted the same day (August 24, 2018), so I’m very suspect of Yeliz Obergfell in Switzerland. E. Sutculer

Devops Institute

• devopsinstitute.com (for-profit) offers 7 certifications.

  Its $289 Foundation certification 50-question 60-minute exam is proctored by PeopleCert in English, French, and German (no Asian languages). VIDEO had 289 views. Learning objectives of its foundation exam:

  • DevOps objectives and vocabulary
  • Benefits to the business and IT
  • Principles and practices including Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, testing, security and the Three Ways
  • DevOps relationship to Agile, Lean and ITSM
  • Improved workflows, communication and feedback loops
  • Automation practices, including deployment pipelines and DevOps toolchains
  • Scaling DevOps for the enterprise
  • Critical success factors and key performance indicators
  • Real-life examples and results
    
    

  Its VIDEO: 16-hour prep class are taught at Cloudbees conferences for $1,500.

---