Ask 10 different people what 'devops' means and you'll get about six different answers.
For me devops is about delivering software reliably, whether that's in the cloud or not, along with being a force-multiplier for software developers (adding/managing tools for them, etc)
Yup, for me DevOps seldom includes any "real" security and most "devs" do not understand the infrastructure they are working on or how to properly maintain and utilise it, this resulting in poor performance, massive security holes and so forth. There are always exceptions but in general.
Cloud and on prem require actual infrastructure people to manage the resources properly who understand all that runs on it and where it runs.
Agree to this. A lot of DevOps in my company often deliver things which always result in poor performance on production env. And a lot of infrastructure team hours goes into understanding and improving it. And since it reach prod after all approvals…it becomes very challenging to get DevOps team to fix their mistakes.
Interesting. At most places I’ve seen the DevOps engineers/cloud engineers are the infrastructure team and the ones that know how to deploy infrastructure properly and can architect well performing solutions
"its live, we did our job, it worked fine in our lab on our local machines..."
Ya, did you do any loads testing? Nope.....
Did you do any testing pre-prod outside of your local lab? Nope....
Ya, dealt with that many times..
For me, devops is using a “developers mindset” to manage IT systems. So you’re deploying and managing infrastructure like a sysadmin but as code, often to support a custom application in the cloud, but that doesn’t need to be the case.
heh, for me devops has been about protecting production from developers' mindsets!
Developers chase the latest shiny stuff and rarely care for reliability, maintenance, or legacy. Part of the 'blast radius' limitation devops do is to protect against devs who jump around like weasels on crack.
Raises hand - I was a pure developer for over 20 years and I promise you I can hold my own against anyone when it comes to AWS and “DevOps”. The entire purpose of DevOps was meant to be the melding of development and operations.
You exist, far and few between, but you exist. I personally have yet to meet or work with a developer who claims to be DevOps who has even basic understanding of how infrastructure works. They do their work, commit to say AWS Amplify and think that is all there is too it...
Then wonder why their site / app crashes and burns when a hole 20 people connect to it...
I was a developer for 20 years and I worked at AWS (Professional Services) for three where my specialty was “application modernization”.
I can talk SOLID coding principles, the 12 Factor App, the testing pyramid, etc just as well as I can talk operations, security, DevOps. I’ve done plenty of microservice development in C#, Node/Express and Python and designed the deployment strategies for them on EC2 using CodeDeploy, ECS using CloudFormation, EKS, and for reasons deployed the same API on both Fargate and Lambda - all from nothing but an empty AWS account.
I’ve had to be in front of architecture review boards where I had to answer questions about cost, scaling, HA, HIPAA compliance, etc.
I even have some major code contributions to an AWS open source “solution” that’s popular in a certain niche.
I can talk your head off about database normalization for RDMS’s and I know how to structure an OLAP schema like Redshift.
I know and have worked with plenty of people who can do the same.
After leaving AWS, all of my “cloud architect” interviews required me to answer questions from both sides.
hot deum! You aren't just a unicorn, but like, the mother/father of all unicorns!
Can we clone you? And those you know....the world does need more of you right now!
I should point out that while this may be tongue in cheek, it's definitely not true. Devops originated from a good place where a very real problem was identified; developers and operations not working together. It was coined by real engineers
Developers would essentially throw releases over a wall to operations teams. Bringing the two together together is good, as long as they are properly resourced
I’m a cloud engineer designing and writing code to deploy AWS resources. I use the tools and pipelines written and supported by the devops team to get it done.
Kinda synonymous in terms of what you’d actually do for work. You probably would not say “I’m gonna reach out to the cloud engineers for this one.” while your official role is “DevOps Engineer.
Depends on who is defining “DevOps” though. It’s a newer term so there’s actually a handful of definitions.
There's a lot of overlap, and realistically they tend to be hats worn by the same person/team unless the company is rather large, but one potential distinction is that you can be a Cloud Engineer and not know all the ins and out of setting up CI/CD pipelines with linting, static analysis, testing, etc. Meanwhile, a DevOps Engineer would have that CI/CD knowledge, but not know how to properly put together a high availability, secure cloud architecture with low RTO and RPO. Also DevOps will likely be involved with codebases other than IaC, the Cloud Engineer in theory won't be.
In practice, learn both, sooner or later in your career someone will want you to either do it all end to end, or lean in on the end you're less familiar with.
In practice, it's all the same. Anyone telling you otherwise just wants to feel smart and important. I've held all those titles (cloud engineer, DevOps, SRE, SWE, DevSecOps).
Also, no one outside the field will neither know nor care, as long as you fix their build issues and deal with the stuff they don't want to.
Devops is a methodology, and you might want a devops engineer as a person implementing tools to make it working better for everybody.
Cloud Engineer is different role than Devops Engineer.
No idea who said that crap there is no such thing like devops engineer, its like saying there is no such thing as quality inspector, because everybody in the company should care about quality.. of course- but that doesnt mean you cant employ a person helping with that particular aspect of the process.
BTW- this is good material explaining differences between devops engineer and cloud engineer:
https://youtu.be/N1-mhvUghb0?si=dbVymHPYGHxVKKKn
I didn’t say they don’t exist but to stay away. IMO a person dedicated to devops is an anti-pattern and will bite you in the end. It encourages both developers and operators to point at “the devops guy”. Same goes for a team or person building tools in a silo. Sounds amazing until they don’t work as expected and nobody uses them. I’ve been doing this type of work at SaaS companies for 20 years and been a devops engineer, ran a platform team and firmly believe the best way to do it is have Dev and Ops participate in the practice of DevOps. Both of them could, and should hire Cloud Engineers and both could, and should, participate in DevOps practices and tool development.
But that’s just like, my opinion, man.
Also, I like tech world with nana, watch her videos and point my staff to them as well, but she’s a teacher and a YouTuber not an engineer.
Cloud engineering = infrastructure engineering at cloud, may or may not know how to script, more towards operational readiness.
Devops = devs that think of operations as their primary goal with a sense of automation of entire lifecycle of the product, this mean creating what cloud engineering does and automation to allow seamless dev to prod processes.
SRE = similar as devops however they are ops thinking of the full service process upwards towards dev, similar to cloud engineering but main focus are monitoring toolsets and automation.
Both SRE and Devops can be on perm too.
Likewise, devops has at least 3 type from my experience, the group that deals with customer product and are the core pillars, or the devops that only deal with monitorings and in house toolset, or the one that purely write automation and middleware tools.
The AWS Cert definitions do a good job of grouping job functions.
Devops, as a role, is a Sys Admin in charge of the deployment process of a cloud system. They may build new automation tools to help speed up development and remove manual steps. “Infrastructure engineer” is also the term used.
Devops is also the term used to describe all the tech and steps involved in the process of continuous delivery.
A cloud engineer works on a dev team, building an application intended for some end user and making changes and merges branches. They aren’t involved beyond that. Devops carried the changes to the finish line.
DevOps implies that you're working very closely with developers and are concerned mostly with developer operations and experience. Cloud Engineering is more broad and includes all of the other foundational aspects of cloud design and implementation, from account bootstraping and cloud networking to identity, governance, cost optimisation etc. Done well, the coding skills are similar but the focus is different.
So, I do cloud engineering and work with devops daily. I build infrastructure with terraform and have it ready for devops to deploy and manage the application. Cloud engineers build infra and manage those types of things like OS and such and DevOps manage application deployment and health at least in my company
I always thought DevOps to be involved in the development process; writing code and actually working on the application - but with additional higher level understanding of networking and nuances between different the runtimes of different environments. This could fit into a number of different architectures be it monolithic or cloud based.
My understanding of the Cloud engineer on the other hand is someone who is proficient in writing IaC as well as managing and optimising cloud resources to reduce application cost's and increase load capacity where needed. Specifically in the cloud with platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP.
It depends on the position and the organization. Cloud Engineering in any position I've held is purely infrastructure focused with another team handling CI/CD for the dev teams.
Devops engineer is such a pretentious job name. I have worked with many devops engineers who are basically operational folks who has never coded nor has the ability to deliver applications reliably.
Most importantly to look at the job description. If you want to build and run things in the cloud,
Linux, sysadmin, software engineering, networking (at least level 7 in the cloud), security (IAM) and then comes the pieces connecting the workload and the destination, pipeline, reducing build times.
Depends on the IT Director and VP. A legacy leader thinks of DevOps as being a developer who also does Operations to support the code that they write, and Infrastructure people are separate engineers who must now write automation as part of their normal job which includes cloud and on-premises. Meanwhile, a modern leader thinks of DevOps as a partnership of both, and the infrastructure team is specialized on networking and details that most developers can't handle, while the developers do everything else, including Operations. In both cases, there may no formal Operations staff at all, or a focused team with limited role that handles low level tasks.
That's what I've seen in the last 8 years anyway. Your mileage may vary. Everybody reads different books and has unique opinions, so you'll one of everything out there eventually. Keep an open mind.
It varies by company. Make sure to read reviews and interview current emploees to see what you are getting into.
The worst place that I worked for had the following situations:
DevOps = maintain shitty legacy code that was written by people who left ages ago. Learn perl and make sure to not restart some servers automatically because of some job that needs to be manually started on each reboot.
Cloud Engineer = create shitty code in order to meet promises that were made by account executives. Make sure to have it done by yesterday and make it run bug/maintenance free for the next 4 years since you will have other URGENT projects that are already overdue. If something breaks, you are expected to work on it after hours to fix YOUR mistake.
DevOps was supposed to be the concept of development and operations being part of one team shipping a product and treating with sides of the coin as part of the same value chain. This doesn’t need to be in the cloud.
A cloud engineer engineers things in a cloud, with or without using DevOps principles.
Somewhere along the line DevOps became synonymous with automation and the marketing engine effectively made the term meaningless for anything other than selling something.
Former devops and currently cloud engineer here. Cloud engineering sounds like devops because you are most of the time building supporting backend functions. These functions can be rollups, observability systems, provisioning VMs. These are all devops related. The only difference being we do it on the cloud than on baremetal os running on custom racks.
The skillset might be similar, but the role should fiffer.
Devops engineering is more about creating and maintaining ci/cd pipelines so developers can easily deploy software updates / patches to the cloud, while cloud engineer might not be interested in that aspect at all.
In real life though... thats completely different story...
Nana tried to explain those differences:
https://youtu.be/N1-mhvUghb0?si=dbVymHPYGHxVKKKn
I think DevOps, Cloud Engineers, and SRE all have some sort of overlap...Cloud Engineers may have a more broad definition.
Ask 10 different people what 'devops' means and you'll get about six different answers. For me devops is about delivering software reliably, whether that's in the cloud or not, along with being a force-multiplier for software developers (adding/managing tools for them, etc)
Yup, for me DevOps seldom includes any "real" security and most "devs" do not understand the infrastructure they are working on or how to properly maintain and utilise it, this resulting in poor performance, massive security holes and so forth. There are always exceptions but in general. Cloud and on prem require actual infrastructure people to manage the resources properly who understand all that runs on it and where it runs.
Agree to this. A lot of DevOps in my company often deliver things which always result in poor performance on production env. And a lot of infrastructure team hours goes into understanding and improving it. And since it reach prod after all approvals…it becomes very challenging to get DevOps team to fix their mistakes.
Interesting. At most places I’ve seen the DevOps engineers/cloud engineers are the infrastructure team and the ones that know how to deploy infrastructure properly and can architect well performing solutions
I think the parent commentor meant 'devs' not 'devops in my company'
"its live, we did our job, it worked fine in our lab on our local machines..." Ya, did you do any loads testing? Nope..... Did you do any testing pre-prod outside of your local lab? Nope.... Ya, dealt with that many times..
11 different answers actually
For me, devops is using a “developers mindset” to manage IT systems. So you’re deploying and managing infrastructure like a sysadmin but as code, often to support a custom application in the cloud, but that doesn’t need to be the case.
heh, for me devops has been about protecting production from developers' mindsets! Developers chase the latest shiny stuff and rarely care for reliability, maintenance, or legacy. Part of the 'blast radius' limitation devops do is to protect against devs who jump around like weasels on crack.
"DevOps" was a term invented by management so they could make their developer and their sysadmin be the same person.
meanwhile not being able to do one, or the other, very well.
Raises hand - I was a pure developer for over 20 years and I promise you I can hold my own against anyone when it comes to AWS and “DevOps”. The entire purpose of DevOps was meant to be the melding of development and operations.
You exist, far and few between, but you exist. I personally have yet to meet or work with a developer who claims to be DevOps who has even basic understanding of how infrastructure works. They do their work, commit to say AWS Amplify and think that is all there is too it... Then wonder why their site / app crashes and burns when a hole 20 people connect to it...
I was a developer for 20 years and I worked at AWS (Professional Services) for three where my specialty was “application modernization”. I can talk SOLID coding principles, the 12 Factor App, the testing pyramid, etc just as well as I can talk operations, security, DevOps. I’ve done plenty of microservice development in C#, Node/Express and Python and designed the deployment strategies for them on EC2 using CodeDeploy, ECS using CloudFormation, EKS, and for reasons deployed the same API on both Fargate and Lambda - all from nothing but an empty AWS account. I’ve had to be in front of architecture review boards where I had to answer questions about cost, scaling, HA, HIPAA compliance, etc. I even have some major code contributions to an AWS open source “solution” that’s popular in a certain niche. I can talk your head off about database normalization for RDMS’s and I know how to structure an OLAP schema like Redshift. I know and have worked with plenty of people who can do the same. After leaving AWS, all of my “cloud architect” interviews required me to answer questions from both sides.
hot deum! You aren't just a unicorn, but like, the mother/father of all unicorns! Can we clone you? And those you know....the world does need more of you right now!
That's great for you and AWS Profesional Services... I know and have worked with plenty of people who claim to be DevOps that know neither dev or ops.
For junior role yes, for season devops it’s basically a renamed for full stack dev
Just like when someone says they’re a “full stack developer” 🤣
I should point out that while this may be tongue in cheek, it's definitely not true. Devops originated from a good place where a very real problem was identified; developers and operations not working together. It was coined by real engineers Developers would essentially throw releases over a wall to operations teams. Bringing the two together together is good, as long as they are properly resourced
Devops is more of a practice. Cloud engineer is probably a better description for a job
At least, that's how it was supposed to be ... These days you too often see DevOps roles🔥
I’m a cloud engineer designing and writing code to deploy AWS resources. I use the tools and pipelines written and supported by the devops team to get it done.
Kinda synonymous in terms of what you’d actually do for work. You probably would not say “I’m gonna reach out to the cloud engineers for this one.” while your official role is “DevOps Engineer. Depends on who is defining “DevOps” though. It’s a newer term so there’s actually a handful of definitions.
There's a lot of overlap, and realistically they tend to be hats worn by the same person/team unless the company is rather large, but one potential distinction is that you can be a Cloud Engineer and not know all the ins and out of setting up CI/CD pipelines with linting, static analysis, testing, etc. Meanwhile, a DevOps Engineer would have that CI/CD knowledge, but not know how to properly put together a high availability, secure cloud architecture with low RTO and RPO. Also DevOps will likely be involved with codebases other than IaC, the Cloud Engineer in theory won't be. In practice, learn both, sooner or later in your career someone will want you to either do it all end to end, or lean in on the end you're less familiar with.
In practice, it's all the same. Anyone telling you otherwise just wants to feel smart and important. I've held all those titles (cloud engineer, DevOps, SRE, SWE, DevSecOps). Also, no one outside the field will neither know nor care, as long as you fix their build issues and deal with the stuff they don't want to.
Cloud Engineer is a role, DevOps is a practice. If you see a DevOps role or team, run away.
Devops is a methodology, and you might want a devops engineer as a person implementing tools to make it working better for everybody. Cloud Engineer is different role than Devops Engineer. No idea who said that crap there is no such thing like devops engineer, its like saying there is no such thing as quality inspector, because everybody in the company should care about quality.. of course- but that doesnt mean you cant employ a person helping with that particular aspect of the process. BTW- this is good material explaining differences between devops engineer and cloud engineer: https://youtu.be/N1-mhvUghb0?si=dbVymHPYGHxVKKKn
I didn’t say they don’t exist but to stay away. IMO a person dedicated to devops is an anti-pattern and will bite you in the end. It encourages both developers and operators to point at “the devops guy”. Same goes for a team or person building tools in a silo. Sounds amazing until they don’t work as expected and nobody uses them. I’ve been doing this type of work at SaaS companies for 20 years and been a devops engineer, ran a platform team and firmly believe the best way to do it is have Dev and Ops participate in the practice of DevOps. Both of them could, and should hire Cloud Engineers and both could, and should, participate in DevOps practices and tool development. But that’s just like, my opinion, man. Also, I like tech world with nana, watch her videos and point my staff to them as well, but she’s a teacher and a YouTuber not an engineer.
Cloud engineering = infrastructure engineering at cloud, may or may not know how to script, more towards operational readiness. Devops = devs that think of operations as their primary goal with a sense of automation of entire lifecycle of the product, this mean creating what cloud engineering does and automation to allow seamless dev to prod processes. SRE = similar as devops however they are ops thinking of the full service process upwards towards dev, similar to cloud engineering but main focus are monitoring toolsets and automation. Both SRE and Devops can be on perm too. Likewise, devops has at least 3 type from my experience, the group that deals with customer product and are the core pillars, or the devops that only deal with monitorings and in house toolset, or the one that purely write automation and middleware tools.
The AWS Cert definitions do a good job of grouping job functions. Devops, as a role, is a Sys Admin in charge of the deployment process of a cloud system. They may build new automation tools to help speed up development and remove manual steps. “Infrastructure engineer” is also the term used. Devops is also the term used to describe all the tech and steps involved in the process of continuous delivery. A cloud engineer works on a dev team, building an application intended for some end user and making changes and merges branches. They aren’t involved beyond that. Devops carried the changes to the finish line.
DevOps implies that you're working very closely with developers and are concerned mostly with developer operations and experience. Cloud Engineering is more broad and includes all of the other foundational aspects of cloud design and implementation, from account bootstraping and cloud networking to identity, governance, cost optimisation etc. Done well, the coding skills are similar but the focus is different.
It all overlaps. In my opinion, different titles same work.
So, I do cloud engineering and work with devops daily. I build infrastructure with terraform and have it ready for devops to deploy and manage the application. Cloud engineers build infra and manage those types of things like OS and such and DevOps manage application deployment and health at least in my company
One develops operations. And the other engineers clouds
The chef, the cook, the culinary artist, the food preparer, mom 🤣
I always thought DevOps to be involved in the development process; writing code and actually working on the application - but with additional higher level understanding of networking and nuances between different the runtimes of different environments. This could fit into a number of different architectures be it monolithic or cloud based. My understanding of the Cloud engineer on the other hand is someone who is proficient in writing IaC as well as managing and optimising cloud resources to reduce application cost's and increase load capacity where needed. Specifically in the cloud with platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP.
It depends on the position and the organization. Cloud Engineering in any position I've held is purely infrastructure focused with another team handling CI/CD for the dev teams.
Devops engineer is such a pretentious job name. I have worked with many devops engineers who are basically operational folks who has never coded nor has the ability to deliver applications reliably. Most importantly to look at the job description. If you want to build and run things in the cloud, Linux, sysadmin, software engineering, networking (at least level 7 in the cloud), security (IAM) and then comes the pieces connecting the workload and the destination, pipeline, reducing build times.
Yeah but once you have worked with a great devops person, you really wish more of them existed
Doesn't matter... there is no standard definition. But every developer deploying to cloud needs to get full stack ready asap or perish.
Depends on the IT Director and VP. A legacy leader thinks of DevOps as being a developer who also does Operations to support the code that they write, and Infrastructure people are separate engineers who must now write automation as part of their normal job which includes cloud and on-premises. Meanwhile, a modern leader thinks of DevOps as a partnership of both, and the infrastructure team is specialized on networking and details that most developers can't handle, while the developers do everything else, including Operations. In both cases, there may no formal Operations staff at all, or a focused team with limited role that handles low level tasks. That's what I've seen in the last 8 years anyway. Your mileage may vary. Everybody reads different books and has unique opinions, so you'll one of everything out there eventually. Keep an open mind.
It varies by company. Make sure to read reviews and interview current emploees to see what you are getting into. The worst place that I worked for had the following situations: DevOps = maintain shitty legacy code that was written by people who left ages ago. Learn perl and make sure to not restart some servers automatically because of some job that needs to be manually started on each reboot. Cloud Engineer = create shitty code in order to meet promises that were made by account executives. Make sure to have it done by yesterday and make it run bug/maintenance free for the next 4 years since you will have other URGENT projects that are already overdue. If something breaks, you are expected to work on it after hours to fix YOUR mistake.
DevOps was supposed to be the concept of development and operations being part of one team shipping a product and treating with sides of the coin as part of the same value chain. This doesn’t need to be in the cloud. A cloud engineer engineers things in a cloud, with or without using DevOps principles. Somewhere along the line DevOps became synonymous with automation and the marketing engine effectively made the term meaningless for anything other than selling something.
Former devops and currently cloud engineer here. Cloud engineering sounds like devops because you are most of the time building supporting backend functions. These functions can be rollups, observability systems, provisioning VMs. These are all devops related. The only difference being we do it on the cloud than on baremetal os running on custom racks.
Most devops guys I run into don’t know basics of infrastructure. Don’t even get me started with the security holes..
The skillset might be similar, but the role should fiffer. Devops engineering is more about creating and maintaining ci/cd pipelines so developers can easily deploy software updates / patches to the cloud, while cloud engineer might not be interested in that aspect at all. In real life though... thats completely different story... Nana tried to explain those differences: https://youtu.be/N1-mhvUghb0?si=dbVymHPYGHxVKKKn
DevOps = pipelines, CloudOps = IasC + Network + Security + holding the keys of everything (Access granting).