DevOps is a subset of Software Engineering. Can we quit the DevOps Engineering vs Software Engineering debate already?
DevOps started as a philosophy – a way to bridge the gap between operations teams and software engineering teams in order to provide more efficiency and transparency. Why should people who develop the software not care about how it operates? Why should the people who operate the software not care about how it was developed? This is worth thinking about.
In the modern day and age, the term “Software Engineer” is actually vast. Software Engineering is a gigantic field with many subsets.
Some of these subsets include:
- Web Development (full-stack, frontend, and backend)
- Mobile Development (full-stack, frontend, and backend)
- Game Development
- Systems Engineer
- Data Engineering
- Site Reliability Engineer
- Machine Learning Engineering
- Virtual Reality Engineering
- Desktop Application Developer
Do you want to know another subset? DevOps!
Yes, DevOps in the modern era is nothing but a subset of Software Engineering. That’s going to trigger a whole lot of people who come from the operations side of things, but it’s true.
Essentially, a modern DevOps Engineer is a software engineer who focuses on infrastructure, automation, and internal tooling. These are the folks who write code to make sure that all the other code that was written, works as expected.
Sure, they may use more pre-made tools than web developers. But web developers use plenty of tools and pre-made services too. Modern web development, in fact, is all about glueing together pre-made services, and there are plenty of subsets that I listed above that are too heavy too (like data engineering).
Similar “DevOps Engineer” titles include:
- Platform Engineer
- Cloud Engineer
- Infrastructure Engineer
- Systems Engineer
The titles are industry-specific. But I hope this clears things up for you who are wondering what DevOps is all about.
Basically, “Software Engineer vs DevOps Engineer” is like asking “What’s better, a vehicle or a truck??”
What are your thoughts?
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Connect with the author on Linkedin here: Cecilia Akinyi
