DevOps

The DevOps Market in India is Growing Exponentially

In India, DevOps engineers rank among the highest-paid professionals working in the IT sector. According to the CEO magazine, the DevOps market in India is expected to reach US$ 3.3 billion by 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 20.1% from 2018 to 2023. There is an excellent opportunity for Indian tech experts in this particular field that has been around for only a few years.

We have seen Indians making massive success in the digital industry as it provides skilled personnel in different types of outsourcing platforms. The Technology sector has become one of the country’s most lucrative sources of income. Also, a lot of young people are learning a variety of skills to stand out in the market as a great service provider.

If you are considering a career in the technological sector, you can consider DevOps. Before that, you should have a good understanding of DevOps and its condition in India. This article will give you a brief overview of DevOps and what you need to get started.

What is DevOps?

DevOps can be divided into two parts: Development and Operations. Development refers to software development, while Operations refers to data management.

According to Wikipedia, “DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle.” It combines culture, practices, and tools to automate and streamline the delivery of applications and services quickly, reliably, and continuously.

DevOps can be a difficult concept to understand since it involves many things. The field involves coding, building, testing, packaging, releasing, configuring, and monitoring, and one needs to master them all to become a skilled DevOps engineer.

Learn more about DevOps: What Is DevOps?

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Impacted the DevOps Market

In this section, we will discuss various topics highlighting how the pandemic influenced the DevOps market.

DevOps pay grade in India

According to Glassdoor, which is a pretty popular recruitment site for jobs, the average salary of a DevOps engineer is 8 lakh rupees per year. The lowest payment is 530k rupees, and the highest is 1,311k rupees annually.

Skilled DevOps engineers earn more.

PayScale elaborates that the more skill a DevOps engineer has, the more likely that they will move to the next position and earn more. The salary of this role in the US is about 9 to 10 times higher than what you can expect in India. But considering the cost of living in both countries, it’s not much of a difference.

DevOps is among the highest-paying jobs.

According to a survey done by Stack Overflow in May 2023, a DevOps engineer is one of the highest-paid in the IT industry, with a median yearly salary of $26,051.

Many Indian companies are seeking DevOps engineers

According to Harshal Sawant, practice lead for DevOps at healthcare firm CitiusTech, more than 87% of Indian companies stepped on the field of DevOps in 2018. When it comes to India, tech giants like Oracle, Infosys, Accenture, Tech Mahindra, TCS, IBM, and Wipro, are always seeking professionals with DevOps skills and constantly have open positions for roles such as DevOps Architect, DevOps manager, DevOps Engineer, Automation Engineer, Security Engineer, and Release manager.

Demand for DevOps is growing.

The Google trend for DevOps in India is obviously growing, and the search rates for courses among developers and freshers are rapidly increasing as they understand the importance of this role. See the trends below:

Is DevOps a Good Career?

There is a very high demand for DevOps because it has a reputation for being one of the most challenging roles in the tech industry. You can start out as a software engineer, system or network administrator, or QA engineer, among other roles. You need to handle not only the development process but also testing and sometimes even system administration.

The job is not for everyone because it requires a diverse range of skills. It is hard, but the pay is significant, and it eventually comes down to your interests and ability. Individuals who have thrived in this field due to their hard work and passion are now in top positions because skilled DevOps engineers are scarce.

Does DevOps Require Coding?

There are a variety of skills required for a DevOps engineer to carry out their daily tasks successfully. The following are some examples of what a DevOps engineer needs to know instead of just regular programming:

Linux: Linux is the most popular and widely used operating system on servers. Hence, being proficient in Linux is crucial as a DevOps engineer.
Bash/Python scripting: DevOps is mainly about automation. With Python and Bash scripting can successfully automate repetitive tasks.
Infrastructure as code: A DevOps engineer needs a solid foundation in using tools like Terraform for provisioning infrastructure resources and Ansible for configuration management.
Open-source tools: You must be familiar with the various open-source tools you need in the profession. You may also need the essential skills to customize these tools based on your needs.
Containerization: Container tools like Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes are crucial for a DevOps engineer to know.
Cloud: As more companies migrate to the cloud, you definitely need expertise in at least one of the major cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure
CI/CD/CD: Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/ Continuous Deployment pipelines are core to DevOps. This includes packaging, testing, code analysis, building, and deployment of software applications.
Security: DevOps engineers must understand security principles to secure whatever they are automating. They need to ensure container security, infrastructure security, CI/CD/CD pipeline security, etc.
Monitoring and Logging: This is also important to ensure that systems or applications are performing well and available. Some tools in this domain are Prometheus and Grafana, Datadog, Cloudwatch, etc.
Collaboration: You must have excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with other teams.

As you can see above, coding alone is not enough to become a DevOps engineer, hence the high demand. The DevOps sector is becoming a competitive space with an increasing number of companies providing DevOps services. Hence, there is no better time than now to acquire the skills you need to become a DevOps engineer.

Is DevOps easy to learn?

Professional DevOps engineers say that DevOps is not easy to learn because you need to have a diverse range of skills to be ready even for an entry-level position. Also, educational institutions don’t teach DevOps well enough because it extends beyond the programming sector into business and data management.

Most DevOps engineers start as systems administrators, and when they are skilled enough, they become DevOps engineers. With proper planning and a career roadmap, you can learn DevOps efficiently.

Here is a DevOps Learning Path developed by KodeKloud to help you get started with DevOps.

How long does it take to learn DevOps?

It can be pretty hard to figure out how many days it will take for you to learn DevOps since it depends on your skills and previous experience. If you have no prior knowledge about software development or any other DevOps-related field, you may need to spend a couple of years until you are skilled enough.

If someone has previous experience, knows some programming languages, and also has a good grasp of data operations, you may need at least six months to master the skills at a basic level. In the end, it all comes down to your learning pace.

Conclusion

DevOps is definitely a good career that requires continuous learning, and it is here to stay as India is the hub of tech companies. Every company wants to embrace this path and deliver software and features as quickly as possible with quality and security in place.

Choosing to build a career in DevOps is an excellent decision, but you have to remember that it requires a variety of skills to be a successful DevOps engineer. Also, with the facts and figures shared in this article, India is definitely on the rise when it comes to DevOps.

Mumshad Mannambeth

Sep 21, 2021 • 6 min read