What should backend developers Ideally know about CI/CD, Cloud, and Containerization at the time of interviews?

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I am a Backend developer. DevOps and development are separate functions in my current organization. While we use CI/CD pipelines and cloud platforms like AWS and GCP, the DevOps team handles most of the infrastructure and pipeline work. My work has largely encompassed core backend development.

Well, talking of that, yes, I do have direct experience working on Jenkins for CI/CD and Ansible and Terraform for automations. Our deployments are vanilla AWS and GCP configs — nothing overly involved.

Recently, I’ve been browsing job ads and noticed a lot of them requiring developers to be aware of CI/CD pipelines, cloud operations, and containerization tools.

Any feedback from interview and hiring experience folks would be appreciated:

  • What is the typical level of CI/CD proficiency we can expect from backend engineers?
  • Which CI/CD tools are typically the most widely used in industry these days (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.)?
  • How much cloud awareness do we expect to have? Do I need to become more specialized with AWS, GCP, or Azure — and how many of their services?
  • How important are Kubernetes and Docker to a backend engineer? How much hands-on exposure should interviewers expect around these?

Any advice from experience would be much appreciated as I prepare for a potential career transition.

Thanks in advance!

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I’m the infra/DevOps guy here

  1. Mixing up dev and devops roles? Beware!
    Any employer expecting you as the backend-dev to ALSO be responsible for automation, deployment, security, maybe even monitoring - run! That’s exploitation. In the end you will be called at 3 am because one of the drives in a RAID 0 broke, while actually being just hired to write code.

  2. Most common CI/CD Tools
    GitHub Actions is popular, being connected of the GitHub repositories.
    Jenkins is still common, especially in older setups
    GitLab is mostly for the self-hosted community
    AWS, Azure, GCP have their own CI/CD platforms and tools

  3. How much cloud do you need?
    The basics should be enough for a backend dev
    You have heard of EC2, S3, RDS
    You know how to deploy a simple app in the cloud
    You know what IAM and a VPC is

That said: Expecting you to name which virtual machine is best for what purpose is over the top. Focus on the things in the basic cloud certfications of the big three (AWS and/or Azure is enough).

  1. How much container knowledge?
    Docker is almost mandatory. Containerizing you code and testing it locally has become common in dev settings.
    K8s/orchestration: A complex beast with its own training and certifications. Any employer expecting you as the dev to build and manage complex clusters - avoid them. That’s the job of specialized and trained Ops and DevOps folks.

As a backend dev you should be familiar with the basics of ops and infra, but not be responsible for it. Know enough to collaborate, not to carry. If you are interested in DevOps, best make it a dedicated career.

Best Regards

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