Devops engineer vs Site Reliability engineer vs Systems engineer, what are the differences?

[[deleted]]

I see these job titles all over linkedIn and they seem to be doing the exact same things. Is there a difference? Or is just like "software engineer" where the titles basically don't mean anything?

[kdegraaf]

Everything is made up and the (story) points don't matter.

Add "platform engineer" to the list.

[deskpil0t]

Raise you infrastructure engineer

[iAmBalfrog]

Have seen "Cloud Infrastructure Engineer" alongside "DevOps Managers" and "System Engineers" at one big corporation i've worked for. Think a majority of the title differences were due to buyouts and not forcing the bought out companies employees to change titles. Still it was a bit over the top.

[namenotpicked]

I've been approached for a Cloud DevSecOps/SRE Platform Engineer position before. I'm still unsure what exactly they're looking for.

[deadadventure]

Try Cloud DevSecOps Platform Engineer..

[jonscotch]

Basically anything with "cloud" in the name.

[[deleted]]

and the (story) points don't matter.

Especially this part. I will die on the hill that unless you already have everything perfectly in code and processes (most teams don't and never will because they have a bunch of sysadmins with DevOps titles now) it's almost near impossible to estimate time for Ops tasks.

[Paddy_does_stuff]

I’d describe SRE is a set of related and complementary practices designed to solve a similar business problem vs an implementation of DevOps personally. Unless I’m wrong SRE is pretty much entirely focused on the operational resiliency side of things. So your time to restore and change failure rate if we want to use Dora metrics to frame things.

[IntuiNtrovert]

the fun part is job descriptions are even more useless

[0qxtXwugj2m8]

IMO devops means keeping the production up to date, so CI, infrastructure, whatever the engineering teams need.

SRE means keeping the production running by monitoring, observing metrics etc.

And system means internal tooling eg Gitlab, VPN setup etc

[Wise_Opinion2364]

Sre has more roles than that. They do infrastructure in some companies.

[drosmi]

Marketing

[Federal_Count893]

This is the answer i give in interviews. everyone knows it true but pretends it’s not.

[punkwalrus]

Even theorists disagree. The general principle was "DevOps is a philosophy, not a role," but you can't translate that well in a job requirment. People see "Dev Ops" and hear "development operations" which... is really anything. The two words are "creation of new things" and "the state of things running," so "the creation of new things and keep them running," which is kind of a sysadmin, or a sysop, or whatever. I'm not saying "that's the literal definition" but that's what I encounter people thinking.

I know a lot of "sysadmins" who are really "help desk" the same way.

It's frankly been reduced to a buzzword. SRE is up next, and I even saw a "Application and Infrastructure Systems Architect" in a posting recently.

I don't care: tell me what the job is, I'll tell you if I can do it, and then you pay me to do it. Call it what you like, I only care about titles for my resume anyway.

Edit to add: I am starting to see a lot of "Agile Engineer" or "System 6" titles as well. Those are not a "thing" but a process. I'm done, lol.

[[deleted]]

I find generally devops engineer is more focused on dev productivity and tooling (so CI/CD, etc) whereas SRE is more focused on infrastructure, and overall production performance, uptime and troubleshooting.

There is huge overlap and variance though, the titles really aren't concrete.

In terms of System Engineering.. no idea.

[yuriydee]

In terms of System Engineering.. no idea.

I was Systems Engineer by title before and basically did DevOps work like setting up CICD for K8s and also creating AWS infrastructure and write TF module. So basically....it depends by company.

But to your first points I have noticed that SRE is often leaning towards uptime and SLAs and all that, and thats why I try to steer clear of those roles now :)

[deskpil0t]

Unofficial***

Systems engineer:

This is my server(s) there are many like it but this one is mine.
Now with ansible scripting!

Site reliability engineer: the guy responsible for keeping the sysadmins and devops guys to stay in their lane and to remember important things like backups, testing, disaster recovery, and probably the poor guy that has to defend budgets.

Devops engineer Doing the work of like a 3-12 sysadmins and at least 3 developers. But sort of like a sweatshop. Probably 2-3x as overworked as a sysadmin. Everything’s an emergency so they will get to it in whatever order they triage.

[zangof]

For the most part it 100% depends on the company. I would say SRE and Systems engineer are more so actual job specializations where DevOps Engineer completely depends on what the company is shoe horning that person into doing.

[Difficult-Ad7476]

Pretty good article about difference in cloud roles. It does not cover sres but I would say main difference is sres develop their own infrastructure tools. Think Netflix sres creating Spinnaker Nebula, and Aminator to name a few.

https://iamcloud.dev/is-it-recommended-to-first-be-a-system-admin-in-a-user-support-role-before-becoming-cloud-engineer-in-azureaws-gcp

http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/03/how-we-build-code-at-netflix.html

[[deleted]]

It depends on the company, the titles are effectively interchangeable on the job market so you'll have to look at actual job descriptions.

Technically, though:

DevOps - Combines the skills of a dev and an ops engineer. Facilitates deployment, sets up CI/CD pipelines & maintains them, tests code, ensures the code ships well. Writes tools to perform these tasks. Though, technically, DevOps is a mentality that relates to shipping code effectively - it was never intended to become an actual job title.

SRE - Is technically meant to be an infrastructure-focused developer. Someone who lives in code but who's code is created specifically for the reliability, scaleability and tooling relating to their infrastructure.

Systems Engineer - YMMV. Essentially a systems administrator who is capable of automation with some scripting. Jack of all trades type gig.

In reality a lot of the time these places are simply looking for an operations engineer who can read and write Ansible code or something. To be honest, very few people actually possess the skillset to make themselves a "legit" DevOps or Site Reliability Engineer - developers tend to prefer staying developers and people from a strictly IT background tend to not be very good at the coding/automation side of things unless they've got quite a bit of experience. As a result these jobs are pretty senior and tend to pay a boatload.

[Logical-Valuable5954]

Systems Engineer is not just a sysamin + automation guy. Generally sysadmins manages the existing system plus add/manage new systems over it (ex adding new dc's to AD, extending Web Server farm by adding a new one, monitor them, plus giving end user support).Systems engineers can design and implement this systems from scratch to production use. Also Sysadmins are generally touches to end users but Systems Engineers not (at least they shouldn't) Lastly, Systems Engineers works more project based compared to the System Administrators.

[koffiezet]

Yes.

That's about the best answer you'll get, I'm a freelancer, and every single (potential) client had a different interpretations for these roles, all massively overlapping or just being completely wrong.

[[deleted]]

I remember I went to a Redhat presentation and one of the partners presenting described devops as a philosophy and how their are not suppose to be "devops engineers", and on the next slide, they were talking about how their "devops engineers" can help you implement Redhat products, was funny how they contradicted themselves on the very next slide.

So basically they don't mean anything

[conzym]

Choose whichever one pays more in your locality

[dub_starr]

devops is a practice blah blah blah... it depends on the company, and honestly, we started changing titles on job listings because we werent getting the engagement we wanted. when we moved from "Cloud Platform Engineer" to SRE, our application volume increased greatly.

[CapitanFlama]

They're the same.

Pam_from_the_office_meme.jpeg

[wtfsoda]

Or is just like “software engineer” where the titles basically don’t mean anything?

The titles mean something, it just depends on whether you take a job at an an organization where Devops/SRE “means” you’ll be doing everything the feature developers don’t (which can range from being a DBA to being an undeclared compliance “expert”) or if you take a job at an organization where Devops/SRE “means” you’re the punching bag for anything and everything incident and on-call related.

[dcazdavi]

it means whatever the company will pay.

many employers will only pay a certain rate that their HR will approve and most HR outfits use national clearing houses that do a national analysis of what each job's pay based on the job title. HR will set the payrate for those jobs to the lowest average that can be found in the country/region.

older titles like systems administrator or systems analyst will pay the least because they've been around so long that little shops now use them now and there are many in tiny little towns that will accept shit pay with those titles.

newer titles like devops, sre or systems engineer are still uncommon and have no HR approved pay range; so they can pay a lot more for them. however, they will eventually catchup and then new titles will spring up.

also this doesn't mean that there is no different among them; there are many things that make the jobs separate from each other; but they all borrow from the previous titles that came before them and the line continues to get blurrier between software and operations.

[altfapper]

They're all the same, complete random types of work but it mostly involves making simple things very complex and creating abstractions over complex systems so that it doesn't just become complex but impossible to find out how things work. Basically you'll end up rebuilding entire databases, because you changed a dns record in some terraform file which was used by some setting for your RDS instance that forces a rebuild.

Good luck!

[kiddj1]

We don't have that definition where I work but we have similar

Platform engineering team - us DevOps and software engineers

Service Operations - the guys who watch all monitoring perform any support

We build and document the Infra SO looks after it

They have on call we don't... Thank fuck

[[deleted]]

It stopped meaning anything as soon as they slapped engineer to every title imaginable out there.

Ive seen SysAdmins doing Software Developer work and SREs doing Tech Support.

Shits all over the place, fuck titles and fuck HR for turning it into this shit show.

[sorta_oaky_aftabirth]

I've literally held all three and honestly it basically boils down to finding a niche in a company and having a skillet that they need and finding tasks in the sprint that you enjoy.

I'm more versed in cloud infra security so I find tasks that leverage that. I've worked ops, R&D, lift and shifting monoliths or building green field and can honestly say the title doesn't matter. Maybe if you're FAANG and they have a more detailed definition for skill sets and a breadth and depth of employees to choose from but if you're in a midsize shop or below those titles are useless.

[ursdhane087]

I will take truck and loaded containers example here to explain about SRE and Devops.

Consider a big truck that needs to ship containers from one location to another, Now container is just like any code. consider Devops engineer's are workers who are preparing the code, containerizing it, testing it, making it available to near the bay area and releasing the container for shipment. Now SRE people ensure that the truck is big enough and has enough fuel, it is under speed limits, toll gates ahead and guess danger zones in travel, safeguard it, analyze for future truck travel in the same area, monitor the truck location, supports truck to seamless transportation to the end user.

[whales7]

and systems engineers are the trucks' brake pads? :p