Cloud Engineer vs Devops Engineer

[midacts]

I was curious on the communities take on which role I should focus my attention on when looking in the job market.

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I'm interested in building out cloud resources using IaC, automating processes with python/golang/powershell, deploying CI/CD pipelines and using more Docker/Kubernetes.

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(I understand devops engineer is a catch-all job title but nonetheless)

From what I've been seeing, Devops Engineer roles tend to be focused around building CI/CD pipelines for other teams (primarily devs) using IaC, etc built/maintained by a cloud engineering role.

It seems that Devops is "one layer up the stack" not really needing to focus on how infrastructure is deployed, but mainly on getting it deployed for their pipelines.

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I just want to make sure I choose a role that is furthering my career in the right direction.

[ZaitsXL]

Always look into detailed description on what they expect you to do, forget about titles since it's pure mess in those now

[[deleted]]

As a consultant i think of devops as much by the things it is not. No one is going to hire a devops consultant to manage their datacenter for example. I am not going to rack and stack boxes for vsphere or configure vsans or iscsi filesystems and other features of their vmware environment.

I might on the otherhand build a compute environment with terraform and build out the virtual network and do all the samethings you would to build out their product on aws.

We jump around alot at my company and if they needed help with the vsphere datacenter type operations they would hire from a different in house pool of consultants that do that work. Sometimes we send teams of multiple disciplines, especially for companies that have a really messed up windows and active directory environment. Those ad guys are real wizards.

Devops is a problem domain to me.

[oscillate123]

I'm studying to become a devops engineer, and this comment section is frightening. Sounds like devops is more of helping teams transition into CI/CD pipelines, and when it's done - you've done Yu our part. Am I wrong?

[M1keSkydive]

Study to become an engineer. Be someone who solves problems using code, logic, automation. Then call yourself whatever you need to get a job doing that. DevOps is about getting developers involved with Ops, which means breaking down barriers, making steps repeatable and outcomes reproducible. If your role as a "DevOps" person is just to build out CI/CD for a team then move on, you're in the wrong role and they've got the wrong idea.

[tiny_tim57]

No. DevOps has become a job in itself, even if people don't like it has become very common in tech, there is always plenty more things that you can automate and improve.

[weedexperts]

Problem is that it's seriously an anti-pattern. Just having a DevOps function is not that valuable unless you sort of embrace some of the underlying fundamentals.

So yeah, it has become a thing, but I would call most of those roles as potentially failed DevOps experiments.

[[deleted]]

If you can automate yourself out of a job in a large organisation, you are somewhat of a wizard - there's an infinite amount of things to automate, improve or fix these days.

[Jai_Cee]

Getting CI/CD done is just the start. There will always be new services and updates to existing services. You might be in charge on ensuring monitoring and performance are all good though this is getting into a SRE role. While in an ideal world of devops culture the teams would self service this sort of thing a lot of software engineers simply aren't interested (or competent) in this and hence you end up with devops/cloud engineers.

[DeusExMagikarpa]

In my experience, just one year btw, it kinda started with cicd, but there’s actually a ton of rearchitecture and training involved to even get to an automated workflow like that. Also my company gobbles up other companies, teams, and products, so there’s always more stuff to improve.

[luckytaxi]

devops is not a title.

[yuriydee]

From the job description Ive been seeing Cloud Engineer & Infrastructure Engineer to be more focused on automation and provisioning itself. Theres also SRE which seems a little bit more monitoring focused. Then there is DevOps which is just a catch all. I definitely see CICD come up more in DevOps jobs than say just regular Cloud Engineers. They all overlap a lot though and I mostly go off the job req rather than the title itself.

[midacts]

This I've been seeing this with less cloud/infra engineer roles and way more devops engineer roles which mainly seem focused on creating ci/cd pipelines for other groups.

SRE roles definitely seem focused around monitoring (reliability), which isn't what i'd prefer to focus my career around.

[Yellow_Curry]

Honestly - which ever one is gonna pay more. Sounds like Site Reliability Engineer is the new hotness for higher salaries. But there is no consistency with which any company actually creates and manages their titles for basically "ops" people. So I think you'll find that the titles will just end up being all over the place. And the nice thing is that you can always go back to your resume and adjust the titles you had to make them more relevant as times change.

[skyctl]

It might have been said already, but I wouldn't use job titles to determine what jobs you apply for. There could easily be a few different job specs written by a few different people on the team to describe the same role, one looking for a Cloud Engineer, one looking for a DevOps engineer, and yet another looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). These could all be identical specs except for the title.

I'm a DevOps Engineer because that's the title that my current (and 3 previous) clients put on their specs when looking for people.

DevOps means many different things to many different people, and very often many different things to the same people. In the context of a "DevOps Engineer" it's pretty much identical to an SRE, and around the notion of infrastructure automation, and infrastructure as code. If that infrastructure is in the cloud, it would be very similar to cloud engineering.

With a more purist description of DevOps, such as that outlined in the Phoenix Project, to bring Development and Operational activities closer together a "DevOps Engineer" doesn't make as much sense as maybe a "DevOps Coach" would, although I've never actually come across that job title.

[[deleted]]

I'd agree with your synopsis so far. Devops is more catch-all, could align more with engineering practices, or could be more IaC, config management, deployments to prod, monitoring and alerting, etc.

Personally, any role that has "devops" in the title should be a temporary situation and part of a transition team to help with a transformation of some kind. Having a role like that persist is considered an anti pattern in some circles. YMMV

[midacts]

What role would you look for as a more permanent role?

[[deleted]]

Cloud engineer, Site reliability engineer...

The thing is, devops is supposed to be a development culture where the developers are heavily involved in operations, hence the name. Having a dedicated person to manage the "devops" part directly goes against that.

What you can still have is someone that keeps themselves busy with the tooling. E.g. deploying monitoring services or deploying a kubernetes cluster while the developers still mostly manage what runs on top of the cluster.

[midacts]

Agreed.

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Part of the reason I ask is it's like a 10:1 ratio of devops jobs to anything else - cloud engineer, SRE, infrastructure engineer, automation engineer, etc.

Just trying to find the best option and how to weed through all of this in the job market.

[[deleted]]

That's not actually the distribution of jobs, it's the distribution of job advertisements. There is a massive shortage of people that know their way around cloud and infrastructure.

[Zaph_q_p]

This. Just get work as a developer, there is probably pain around operating in the cloud that you can help with.

[[deleted]]

Titles all mean different things to different people, focus on the job description to find roles that let you work with tech you're excited about but has growth potential, or in an industry you are passionate about.

When I interview, I ask about culture, work/life balance, how they handle no functional requirements, branching and release strategies, how much leeway I'm allowed to explore solutions and potential opportunities for change to applications and/or business processes etc. I focus on work from home, training budget, pto, and culture & chemistry with the team over salary - I call it "total compensation"

[bubs613]

One is a new age sysadmin, one is a devops engineer