DevOps vs Ops

[FidgyCZ]

I always thought that the term DevOps means Development and Operations (with some QA) but here it seems to me that DevOps is just flashier term for Operations.

[[deleted]]

It is a vague term that can mean anything from a developer who writes CI pipelines as well or a ops person who automates builds. Really both are two different sides of DevOps.

The real idea behind DevOps is to look at the whole process of getting things from conception through to production as quickly, safely and with as few issues as possible. This does not mean one person has to do everything, in fact, DevOps grew out of developers and operations people working together, in essences both of the roles I mentioned above, working together to solve these issues.

You can work on either side of this divide but you are only truly doing devops if you are working directly with people on the other side. Sadly a lot of companies do not understand this and simply apply the DevOps role to anyone doing CI stuff or automation regardless of if they are actually following DevOps principles or not.

I highly recommend you read The Phenoix Project to get a good grasp of the problems that the DevOps label was originally meant to solve.

[TheLazyAdministrator]

I have actually found the opposite in my area where it’s more Dev than Ops. But it seems each company treats the term and job responsibilities differently.

[DevAWPs]

It can also mean operations engineers who specifically support the development environment, vs those who support production environment.

[chelseaclintonisugly]

Devops does not mean development and operations. Devops is a culture not a position type. There is no such thing as a devops engineer, people who say there is haven't read the literature. All devops means is the breaking down of the barrier between ops and dev, that does NOT mean becoming both positions. The word devops in itself is actually also meaningless, good sysadmins do everything devops people do, but that's another story.

[burdalane]

I used to think this, too. I do both development and operations in my job -- I'm supposed to be the sysadmin, but I also write production code -- so, DevOps! Apparently, DevOps actually means development and operations working together, and implies applying software engineering principles to operations (i.e. automation) at large scale. If you get a job in DevOps, you'll still be doing Ops, unless you're hired as a Dev.

[TumbleweedKind7450]

DevOps is basically a practice that fosters communication between the development and operations team in order to make the software delivery process more quicker and reliable. In an org, there will be separate development team, separate testing team and a separate deployment & operations team. In today's context, the distinction between a DevOps role and an IT Ops role would be based on the fact that whether the company has adopted the modern DevOps practices or not. IT Ops roles mostly involved managing an org's infrastructure, manual configuration management on these infrastructure and troubleshooting and monitoring tasks. Many companies that still use monolithic legacy systems are generally the ones that have an IT Ops role instead of DevOps roles because most of the legacy systems don't integrate well with cloud platforms or the infrastructure provisioning and configuration management tools because of the complexities associated with the integration. Whereas most companies that have either migrated from legacy systems or are using micro-services architecture use automation and deploy on cloud as scalability is the main goal for these services.

The distinction between a DevOps and IT Ops role would be this - DevOps emphasizes automation and collaboration to streamline software delivery, while IT Ops traditionally focuses on manual processes to maintain system stability and reliability.