VS01672 - DevOps Engineer

Linux administration- Ubuntu / Amazon Linux - users and permissions, systemd, networking, disk and memory diagnostics, log analysis, performance troubleshooting. Foundation for everything else in this role
Scripting Bash -to a strong level; Python for automation, tooling and AWS SDK (boto3) work
AWS - compute & storage- EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, EBS, Auto Scaling Groups, AMIs
AWS - networking- VPC, subnets, security groups, NACLs, ALB/NLB, Route 53, CloudFront, NAT gateways, TLS certificates via ACM
AWS - identity & data- IAM roles, policies and least privilege; RDS, ElastiCache, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, KMS
Docker- Writing efficient multi-stage Dockerfiles, image layer and size optimisation, Docker Compose, registries (ECR / Docker Hub), container security scanning
Kubernetes- Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, namespaces, resource limits, HPA, probes, rolling updates, RBAC, debugging a crash-looping pod. EKS specifically
Helm -Chart authoring, values files per environment, releases and rollbacks. Missing from the original list - effectively required once Kubernetes is in play
Jenkins Declarative pipelines as code (Jenkinsfile), shared libraries, agents, credentials management, parallel stages, build artefacts
CI/CD practice Full pipeline design - build, test, scan, package, deploy, verify; environment promotion dev staging production; automated rollback; approval gates. GitHub Actions or GitLab CI as a second tool
Infrastructure as Code Terraform - modules, remote state, workspaces, plan/apply discipline. Missing from the original list - without it, infrastructure is unrepeatable and undocumented
Monitoring & alerting Prometheus + Grafana and/or CloudWatch - dashboards, meaningful alert thresholds, on-call routing (PagerDuty / Opsgenie)
Logging Centralised logging - ELK, Loki or CloudWatch Logs; structured logs, retention policy, log-based debugging
Secrets management AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault or SOPS; credential rotation; zero secrets in Git
Web server & proxy Nginx - reverse proxy, TLS termination, rate limiting, caching headers
Backup & disaster recovery Automated backups, restore drills, defined RTO/RPO, multi-AZ design
Deployment strategies Blue-green, canary, rolling; zero-downtime releases; feature flags
Cloud cost management Cost Explorer, budgets and alerts, right-sizing, Reserved Instances / Savings Plans, spot usage, tagging discipline
Cloud & app security Least-privilege IAM, security groups, WAF, patching cadence, vulnerability scanning (Trivy / Snyk), audit logging via CloudTrail
Incident response Triage under pressure, structured escalation, blameless postmortems, runbook writing