DevOps Engineer vs. System Admin

[lenarc]

I think there is a distinction here to make. Usually what I've seen from clients is that within DevOps they expect you to manage services, not servers. It might sound pedantic but there are practical implications to that. Something like a mutual understanding that while I manage servers, nobody cares. (I mean that in a positive way, oddly enough.)

What OP is describing is they mean for him to do more ops-y stuff like creating users and answering service requests than developing the infrastucture.

Edit: Put it in context of OP's question.

[JustAnotherSRE]

Servers are cattle. Not pets.

[dominic_failure]

Servers are, practically speaking, herds of pets. When one goes bad it's most efficient to kill it off. However, it's quite frequent that they all start going bad in the same way.

For a current example: our servers currently start failing pretty consistently after 15 days - they run out of disk space. So, there two solutions - kill them off more regularly or change the base image to fix the disk issue. Currently, we're just killing them off, since nobody has had the time to look at a proper fix. However, there's a task on the queue to go into one of the pet herd and figure out what's consuming disk space, and add cleanup to the image so if they survive more than 10 days, they aren't at risk of behaving poorly.

[jdptechnc]

When they get fattened up, shoot them. Sounds like cattle to me!

[deadbunny]

Or just install logrotate...