$100.000/year. Why are companies willing to pay so much? Well, first of all, these employees bring a lot of value to these companies. They help them deliver higher quality software, faster, and sometimes even lower costs. But there's another slightly more hidden reason: people that know how to implement DevOps procedures are somewhat rare. Most jobs require employees to have knowledge about one particular subject. They need to do one thing and do it well. But employees responsible for DevOps have to be skilled at many things. They need to have knowledge of a very wide range of subjects, such as Linux server administration, cloud services, containers, automation tools, monitoring tools, and many other things. Not many people are willing to learn so much for a small salary. And companies keep raising the pay for this job position in an attempt to steal skilled employees from their competitors. So, these days, it's a good time to learn about DevOps Certification Training.

But if you're just starting out, you might be wondering: "Do I have what it takes to become good at DevOps?". So let's try to answer this question. Let's see what skills you need to have to be a good fit for this job. We'll break this down into two categories. First, we'll explore skills in the "human" category, so to speak, internal human qualities required for this job. Then we'll look at the technical knowledge that is required.

In this previous article, "What Is DevOps?", we explored how at this job, the main activity is basically building production lines for software. We must take the raw material, code written by our developers, and turn it into something useful for the world, a final software product that we can deliver to our users and customers. This code goes through many automated steps until it ends up as a finished application or software service. And if we're the ones responsible for DevOps, we need to imagine all of the automated steps required and then implement them. This means we need skills like these:

1. We need to be good at planning and thinking ahead. We need to be able to figure out a system that flows well from step to step; something that goes from step A to B to C to D, all the way to Z, as smoothly as possible. This means we need to keep the whole thing in perspective even while we're focused on automating, let's say, step C. While we're working on C, we need to be aware of how to make this as compatible as possible with steps A and B before it, but also with step D and step E that comes after it.
2. We need to be good at building a large system out of small little pieces. Think about how houses are built, brick by brick, or how we can build a toy car out of small LEGO pieces. DevOps processes work the same way. We can have a large system that automatically builds applications and delivers them to customers. But this large system is made out of interconnected small little pieces: a small program here, a small server there, some cloud service, and so on.
3. We need to be able to find the best compromises. The developers will want certain things. The people managing the company's cloud infrastructure and servers will want other things. And it will be up to us to find a way to make both teams reasonably happy and choose solutions that work well for everyone.