DevOps is a broad domain. When it comes to freelance DevOps work, most of the work will be based on infrastructure automation, cloud, and scripting.
The primary skillset should be,
- Design and implementation on cloud platforms
- Good automation experience using tools.
- Good scripting knowledge.
- A better understanding of CI/CD practices.
- Very good understanding of Linux and Containers
- Understanding of distributed systems and clustering.
For a full list of devops skillsets, you can refer to the following article
Guide: DevOps Engineer Guide
Where can you find good DevOps Freelancers and Freelance Projects
For Employers
You can find good DevOps freelancers from freelancer.com. When you post a project, there are high chances of bids from people who don’t have the relevant skills. Go through their reviews and projects they have worked on. Based on the tech stack, you can start the discussion about the project. Also, try to choose people who can communicate well over an audio or video call.
For Freelancers
You can find many DevOps-related freelancing work on freelancer.com. If you really want to work on side gigs as a freelancer, be active on Linkedin DevOps discussion forums and be equipped with the best devops toolsets out there.
There are several things you should look for when hiring DevOps freelancers, but the most important ones are not technical.
Problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration skills are all vital to DevOps. It is also vital that they are not attached to a particular dogma. A true DevOps master will question all established rules. They should bring a fresh perspective and fearlessness to tackle any challenge.
Even if they are just starting out on their DevOps career path, do not dismiss them. Novices often bring the fresh perspective mentioned above and are usually aware of new trends and developments within DevOps.
On the technical side, look for familiarity with continuous integration tools. Such tools include CruiseControl, CruiseControl.NET, Jenkins, Bamboo, Hudson, ThoughtWorks’ Go, Urbancode’s Anthill Pro, Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, and Jetbrains’ Team City.
Across thousands of growing organizations, DevOps professionals are the engineer du jour when it comes to hiring. Hiring DevOps engineers typically means finding a candidate from either an operations and infrastructure background or someone from a software engineering and development background, and sprinkling in key skills related to continuous integration, configuration management, continuous delivery/deployment and cloud infrastructure.
DevOps engineers are often responsible for overseeing the setup, implementation, and maintenance of the DevOps toolchain—tools that help the organization as a whole put DevOps into practice. They should possess a strong working knowledge of Linux/Unix environments, server-side technologies such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), and scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and Shell. The standard toolkit of a DevOps engineer will tend to look something like this:
- Project management, collaboration, and issue tracking tools like Asana, Wrike, and Jira.
- Source control/versioning tools like Git, Bitbucket, SVN (Apache Subversion), and TFS (Team Foundation Server).
- Build tools like Gradle, Maven, and Grunt.
- Development environment tools like Vagrant and Cloud9 IDE.
- Continuous integration tools like Jenkins, TeamCity, and CircleCI.
- Configuration management tools like Ansible, Salt, Puppet, and Chef.
- Monitoring tools like Nagios, Prometheus, and New Relic.
- Container management tools like Docker and Kubernetes.