The DevOps market is confronting a fast-rising demand for skilled engineers, but sourcing the appropriate staff can prove difficult and can also retard or interrupt the flow of projects. According to the Linux Foundation’s 2017 Open Source Jobs Report, 60% of open source professionals and hiring managers are currently looking to fill vacant DevOps engineering positions. The cost of such delays can only be projected – but for sure it will be significant.
According to Scott Weiss, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the California-based venture capital firm, DevOps is more than just a methodology. “It is a must-have skill set for the modern programmer – and increasingly becoming its own department,†he says. “The rise of the hyperscale cloud datacenter has made this job much harder.â€
The 2017 State of DevOps Report published by Puppet concurs, finding that high performing organizations spend 21% less time on work and rework, and 44% more time on new work.
“As organizations undergo DevOps transformations to more quickly deliver applications and services and compete more effectively in the market, most still don’t have access to the right talent who can make this happen,†explains Alvaro Oliveira, Vice President for Talent Operations at Toptal, a global network of top engineers, designers and finance experts designed to help companies accelerate, adapt and scale.
Toptal is launching an on-demand talent specialization that is focused on meeting the rising need for skilled DevOps engineers.
The new service taps into Toptal’s private network of highly skilled IT professionals, and will be able to connect businesses and organizations with freelance DevOps professionals who are experts in virtualization, containerization, automation, continuous integration and delivery and cloud application distribution.
“Our new DevOps practice provides a reliable pipeline of qualified IT professionals who can enable shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, among other agile software development goals,†says Oliveira. Networks like this are designed to help to fill the gaps which frequently occur within typical DevOps cycles, regardless of the size of organizations. The demand for more specialized IT professionals familiar with a broader range of programming options means no organization can be fully confident that they cover all the bases.
“To be effective, today’s DevOps engineer needs to have a developer background and possess a wide knowledge of system administration and network knowledge,†says Andrea Villa, a former DevOps engineer at Atlassian and a system architect at CloudReach. “It’s important that they be able to bridge the gap between the raw code and challenges that the business has to face every day – such as reducing friction between ideas, delivery and consumers.â€
Networks like Toptal can leverage a curated, expert-driven matching process that ensures the right individual or team is found without time-consuming resume reviews and interviews. At times, they will also draw on proprietary technology to help automate the hiring process, driving speed and efficiency. After all, if a skills gap is occurring on a project, it needs to be filled as quickly as possible before everything comes to a halt.
The outcome of expert networks is the availability of a highly-qualified workforce with the specialized skills required to meet the needs of companies. Toptal itself has become the largest distributed workforce partner in the world by following this model. Its annual revenues now exceed $100 million and it has grown at approximately 300% over the last two years.
Larger corporations especially are turning to such solutions to help them underpin critical DevOps projects, among them Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Emirates, Pfizer, Axel Springer and J.P. Morgan, all users of the Toptal network.