Devops continues to expand in development environments everywhere from small startups to the largest global enterprises. The worldwide devops market, including products and services, increased from $10.56 billion in 2023 to $12.4 billion in 2024, according to The Business Research Company. The firm predicts the market will expand to $37.33 billion by 2029.
As increasingly complex IT infrastructure makes IT processes more complicated, devops becomes more essential for its ability to move complex management processes out of human hands with the help of automation. “Organizations across sectors are under sustained pressure to deliver software faster, more reliably, and at greater scale, while also managing increasingly complex cloud and hybrid environments,” says Tasha Jones, creator of Espire Collective, a talent marketplace. “Devops practices sit at the center of that challenge.”
The demand isn’t just about volume but about proven abilities, Jones adds. “There is a nuanced imbalance between the number of people in the market and the availability of experienced practitioners who can design, scale, and govern devops systems effectively,” she says. “Certifications are one way employers try to reduce uncertainty, especially as devops responsibilities expand beyond tooling into reliability, security, and operational resilience.”
There’s clearly increasing demand for devops certifications, “although it is driven more by organizational pressure than by engineering culture,” says Ashley Ward, principal solutions architect at Minimus, a provider of security testing software.
“As devops practices spread into larger, regulated, and less digitally native organizations, leaders need defensible ways to assess skills at scale,” Ward says. “The growth in devops certifications is being driven less by engineers and more by organizational reality.”
Also see: 10 top devops practices no one is talking about.
Also driving the demand for devops certification is the need to get products out to users more quickly and efficiently, with attention to security and data privacy concerns. “In my work building and running production systems, I’ve seen clear growth in demand for devops certifications,” says Sanjeev Kumar, founder of OurNetHelps, which provides digital tools for professionals and students worldwide.
“Companies are under constant pressure to ship faster, keep systems reliable, and scale infrastructure without growing large engineering teams,” Kumar says. “Cloud-native platforms, microservices, and automated deployment pipelines are now standard, and organizations need engineers who can work comfortably in these environments.”
Not surprisingly, the devops certifications most in demand today are cloud and platform-focused, Kumar says.
Certifications and the hiring process
Devops certifications definitely come into play in the hiring process, although they do not replace the need for hands-on experience with devops practices.
“Certifications provide a simple way to signal baseline competence and reduce perceived hiring risk, particularly in environments where decision makers cannot deeply assess every candidate’s technical background,” Ward says.
Increased scrutiny around security, reliability, and cloud cost control has also played a role, he says. “Certifications are often used as a risk reduction mechanism rather than a marker of excellence,” he says. “Even when leaders understand that certification alone is not sufficient, it helps them move forward with confidence in complex hiring environments.”
Devops certifications tend to matter most at the earliest stages of hiring, before the first technical interview, Ward says. “They help candidates pass initial CV screening, particularly when that screening is done by HR or generalist recruiters rather than senior engineers,” he says. “Arranging interviews with multiple senior technical leaders is expensive, not just in the interview itself, but in preparation, evaluation, and follow up. Anything that improves early filtering saves real money for large organizations.”
While certifications rarely influence final hiring decisions on their own, they can materially improve a candidate’s chance of getting an interview, especially for junior and mid-level positions, Ward says. “A recognized Kubernetes or cloud certification doesn’t make someone a great engineer, but it does give hiring teams confidence that the candidate has been exposed to modern delivery patterns,” he says.
Candidates with certifications such as AWS Certified Devops Engineer and Kubernetes Administrator are more attractive, indicating that they have hands-on skills rather than just theoretical learning, says Joshua Haghani, founder and CEO of software provider Lumion.
Certifications provide evidence that a job candidate knows how to build continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and deploy cloud environments at scale, Haghani says.
“Devops certifications offer an organized approach to learning within a dense field, and graduates will have had hands-on experience with tools like Docker, Jenkins, or Terraform,” he says. “Firms do not want to invest in candidates who take a long time before contributing.”
Certifications don’t replace hands-on experience, but they do make candidates more attractive, Kumar says. “A relevant devops certification shows that an engineer understands modern deployment workflows, cloud infrastructure, automation, and reliability practices,” he says. For employers, that reduces hiring risk because these skills directly affect uptime, security, and delivery speed, he says.
Benefits of devops certifications
Aside from helping software developers and engineers land jobs, devops certifications can deliver other benefits.
“The primary benefit of devops certifications is structured learning and the creation of a shared language,” Ward says. “Strong certifications require practitioners to understand not just tools, but underlying principles such as automation, resilience, security, and systems thinking.”
The biggest value of devops certifications is not the credential itself, but the common language they create across teams, Ward says. “From an individual’s perspective, certifications reduce friction in the hiring process and can make career progression easier,” he says. “Certified candidates often move through early hiring stages more smoothly.”
Also see: From devops to CTO: 8 things to start doing now.
From a manager’s perspective, certifications help teams communicate more effectively because assumptions and terminology are already aligned, Ward says. “That shared foundation becomes especially valuable when engineering teams work closely with security, compliance, or audit functions,” he says. “In practice, organizations often use certification-backed best practices to justify improvements such as adopting infrastructure as code, strengthening CI/CD controls, or improving software supply chain security.”
One of the most tangible benefits of certification is access to certain jobs, Jones says. “In regulated or compliance-driven environments, such as parts of the public sector, specific certifications are often required simply to be considered,” she says. “Even highly experienced professionals may not pass initial screening without them.”
More broadly, certifications signal a commitment to continuous learning, Jones says. “Devops tooling and best practices evolve quickly, and leaders tend to value professionals who demonstrate they are staying current rather than relying solely on past experience,” she says. “This matters to both public- and private-sector organizations, where outdated approaches to automation or cloud operations can quickly become operational risks.”
Certifications tied to particular platforms or services are especially valuable. “As devops has become largely inseparable from cloud platforms, certifications from providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services remain highly sought after,” Ward says.
From a technical credibility standpoint, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certifications are particularly well regarded, Ward says. “They reflect real-world cloud-native operations rather than purely theoretical knowledge,” he says.
While cloud certifications are not interchangeable, organizations generally find that skills transfer between platforms with standard onboarding. “If someone understands cloud fundamentals in one platform, most organizations are confident they can adapt to another with the right support,” Ward says.
One of the biggest benefits of devops certifications is the structured way they teach engineers to think about systems, Kumar says. “They cover CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, security, and operations as one connected workflow,” he says. “That systems mindset is far more valuable than knowing a single tool in isolation.”
Popular devops certifications
The value of a devops certification stems from the range of skills and platforms covered. The following are among the most in demand according to experts.
AWS Certified Devops Engineer – Professional
This and similar cloud-focused certifications have gained considerable popularity thanks to continued growth in the use of cloud services as well as the broad adoption of cloud-native environments. The AWS Certified Devops Engineer – Professional certification demonstrates technical expertise in areas such as provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform, according to Amazon Web Services.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
The CKA program was created by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation as a part of an ongoing effort to further develop the Kubernetes ecosystem. The purpose of the program is to show that individuals who earn CKA certification have the skills, knowledge, and ability to perform the responsibilities of Kubernetes administrators, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer
The Google Professional Cloud Devops Engineer certification remains in demand because of the growth of cloud and cloud-native development environments. It demonstrates an ability to deploy processes and capabilities throughout the development lifecycle using Google-recommended methodologies and tools, Google Cloud says. These professionals enable efficient software and infrastructure delivery, while also balancing reliability and speed of delivery speed.
Microsoft Certified Azure Devops Engineer Expert
The Microsoft Certified Azure Devops Engineer Expert certification demonstrates the ability to use Microsoft devops tools that provide continuous security, integration, testing, delivery, deployment, monitoring, and feedback. Professionals design and implement flow of work, collaboration, communication, source control, and automation. Skills earned upon completion include implementation of continuous integration, design of a release strategy with Azure and GitHub, and management of infrastructure as code with Azure, according to Microsoft.
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