DevOps, SRE, platform engineer, cloud role explanation

Article Summary As the DevOps philosophy evolves, there is increasing ambiguity surrounding the responsibilities of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Cloud Engineer, and Platform Engineer related roles. Although these roles overlap, they have subtle differences in focus and skills. DevOps emphasizes collaboration between development and operations teams, while SRE applies software engineering practices to operations, focusing on system reliability. Cloud engineers focus on the management of cloud infrastructure, while platform engineers create internal developer platforms to provide self-service operations capabilities for developers. Role specifications remain unclear due to heterogeneity in DevOps practices and organizational resistance. Therefore, it is crucial to be clear about role expectations and organizational context when hiring. Ensuring that all operational needs are met is critical to supporting developers and realizing the full potential of DevOps.

As originally conceived, DevOps is more of a philosophy than a set of practices, and it is certainly not a job title or role specification. Yet today, DevOps Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and Platform Engineers are all in high demand—their skills overlap, and recruiters sprinkle loosely related keywords into role descriptions, such as “CI/CD Pipelines, Deployment Engineering, Cloud Configuration, and Kubernetes.

When I co-founded Kubiya.ai, my investors pushed me to better define my target market. Is it just DevOps or SRE, Cloud and Platform Engineers and other end users? I’ve seen a lot of interest from job seekers and recruiters lately in defining these roles, from Reddit posts to webinars, here’s a look at it. Controversial Topic.

In this article, I present my thoughts but also recognize that there is a lot of room for interpretation. This is a inflammatory topic for many people. — So at the risk of starting a firestorm, let’s get going!

First, let’s quickly summarize a high-level view of these different roles

DevOps, SRE, Cloud, and Platform roles

DevOps

DevOps roles are all about teamwork and using tools to work smarter, not harder. They bring developers and operations people together to work. Speed releases, improve system stability, and keep everyone on the same page

SRE (Site Reliability Engineer)

The SRE role focuses on making the system reliable and consistent. Scalable. They are like engineers who make sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes, working closely with developers to automate processes and respond quickly to any issues.

Cloud Engineer

The role of a cloud engineer is like an architect of the cloud. They focus on setting up and managing cloud infrastructure, ensuring it is efficient, secure, and cost-effective. They use tools like AWS or Azure to create an environment where applications can thrive.

Platform Engineer

The role of a platform engineer is like a builder of a developer-friendly platform. They design and maintain systems that enable developers to manage their applications easily, From setting up workflows to monitoring performance, it’s all about creating a smooth experience for everyone involved

The evolution of DevOps and new work practices

DevOps practices evolved in the 2000s. , to meet the need to increase release speed and reduce time to market while maintaining system stability. In addition, service-oriented architecture allows separate development teams to work independently on individual services and applications, allowing for faster prototyping and iteration than ever before.

There is a growing traditional tension between development teams focused on software releases and independent, unique operations teams focused on system stability and security. This hinders the pace many businesses aspire to. Additionally, developers don't always correctly understand operational requirements, and operations staff are unable to prevent performance issues before they arise.

As originally conceived, DevOps is more of a philosophy than a set of prescriptive practices—so much so that there isn’t even a consensus on the quantity and nature of those practices. Some people cite "four pillars of DevOps," some cite "five pillars," and some cite six, seven, eight, or nine pillars. you can choose.

Different organizations implement DevOps in different ways (and many do not at all). Here we can anticipate the work norm dilemma we find ourselves in. As DevOpsDays founder Patrick Debois points out, "Not having a definition is good or bad. People...are really struggling right now with what DevOps means. But, on the other hand, not having everything written down means that it's going to open up to Moving in multiple directions.”

The answer to DevOps is to break down silos and encourage broader collaboration through tooling, cultural change, and shared metrics. Developers will own what they build - they will be able to deploy, monitor and troubleshoot end-to-end. Operations will better understand developer needs; engage early in the product lifecycle; and provide education, tools, and guardrails to promote developer self-service.

One thing DevOps doesn’t have is role specification. Fast forward to today, and many organizations are actively recruiting “DevOps engineers.” Worse still, little is known about what defines a position—the skill sets sought vary widely from one position to the next. Related and overlapping roles such as “Site Reliability Engineer,” “Platform Engineer,” and “Cloud Engineer” are muddying already murky waters.

How did we get to this point? What are the real differences (if any) between these roles?

The emergence of new IT roles

As DevOps gains traction, the roles and responsibilities within the DevOps ecosystem are becoming increasingly blurred. This ambiguity has led to the emergence of related roles such as site reliability engineer (SRE), cloud engineer, and platform engineer. Each character has their own unique focus and skills.

Inspired by Google's approach to managing large systems, SRE combines software engineering practices with operations to ensure service reliability and performance. Cloud engineers focus on deploying and managing cloud infrastructure, leveraging platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud to optimize scalability and efficiency. Platform engineers, on the other hand, focus on designing and maintaining an internal developer platform that provides developers with self-service capabilities to manage the operational aspects of the application lifecycle.

While there is overlap between these roles, they each have different areas of expertise and focus. SREs prioritize reliability and resiliency, cloud engineers focus on cloud infrastructure management, and platform engineers focus on creating developer-centric platforms. Understanding the nuances of these roles is critical for organizations to effectively structure their teams and leverage the full potential of DevOps principles in their software delivery pipelines.

Resistance and Confusion about DevOps

In my experience, the original vision of implementing DevOps (i.e., achieving the best balance between specialization and collaboration and sharing) has great impact on has been a challenge for many organizations.

Puppet’s 2021 State of DevOps Report found that only 18% of respondents considered themselves “highly developed” DevOps practitioners. As the DevOps Topologies team describes, some of these benefits come from special circumstances. For example, organizations like Netflix and Facebook arguably have a single web-based product, which reduces the differences between product streams and thus forces further separation of developers and operations staff.

Others impose strict collaboration conditions and standards, such as Google’s SRE team (more on that later!), who also have the power to reject software that compromises system performance.

Many people at lower levels of DevOps development struggle to fully realize the promise of DevOps due to organizational resistance to change, skills shortages, lack of automation, or legacy architecture. Therefore, the group will employ a variety of different approaches to DevOps implementation, including some of the DevOps "anti-types" described in DevOps Topologies.

For many people, development and operations remain siled. For others, DevOps will be a tools team that sits within development and is responsible for deployment pipelines, configuration management, etc., but remains isolated from operations. For others, DevOps will be a simple reinvention of SysAdmin, with DevOps engineers hired into operations teams with expanded skill expectations, but no real cultural change occurs.

The rapid adoption of public cloud usage has also boosted confidence in the promise of a self-service DevOps approach. But being able to provision and provision infrastructure on demand is a far cry from enabling developers to deploy and run applications and services end-to-end. Unfortunately, not all organizations understand this, so automation in many organizations stalls at the infrastructure automation and configuration management level.

With so many different incarnations of DevOps, it’s no surprise that DevOps role specifications are not clearly defined. For one organization, it might be synonymous with deployment engineering in the narrowest sense—perhaps just creating a CI/CD pipeline—while on the other hand, it might be essentially a reinvention of operations, with the ability to write infrastructure Additional skills for coding, deployment automation and internal tooling. For others, it can be any shade of gray in between, so here we have a dizzying list of DevOps job roles.

SRE, Cloud Engineer and Platform Engineer roles

So, depending on the hiring organization, a DevOps engineer can be a completely deployment-focused engineer or a more modern system administrator.

What about other related roles: SRE, cloud engineer and platform engineer? Here are my thoughts on each:

Site Reliability Engineer

The concept of SRE was introduced by Ben Traynor at Google, who described it as “ What you get when you treat operations as a software problem and staff it with software engineers”. The idea is to have people combine operational and software development skills to design and run production systems.

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) combine software engineering practices with operational responsibilities to ensure the reliability, scalability and performance of systems and services. They specialize in designing and implementing automated solutions to manage and monitor infrastructure, deploy software, and proactively respond to incidents. SREs work closely with development teams to establish and enforce reliability standards, define service level objectives (SLOs), and implement practices such as error budgeting to balance innovation with system stability. Their goal is to keep production environments highly available and resilient through continuous improvement and iteration.

Service Reliability The definition of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is critical to ensure that development teams provide up-front evidence that the software meets strict operational standards before it is accepted for deployment. Additionally, SREs strive to make infrastructure systems more scalable and maintainable, including designing and operating standardized CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure platforms for developers to use for this purpose.

As you can see, this overlaps significantly with some people's definition of a DevOps engineer. So maybe one way to think about the difference is this. In contrast, the original purpose of DevOps was to increase release speed, while the goal of SRE is to build more reliable systems in the context of growing system size and product complexity. So in a way, the two met in the middle.

Cloud Engineer

As cloud capabilities continue to grow, some organizations have created dedicated roles for cloud engineers. Likewise, although there are no hard and fast rules, cloud engineers typically focus on deploying and managing cloud infrastructure and know how to build environments for cloud-native applications. They will become experts in AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform. Depending on the degree of overlap with DevOps engineer responsibilities, they may also be proficient in Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.

In addition, cloud engineers use their expertise in cloud technologies to design, implement and maintain scalable and elastic cloud architectures to ensure that applications and systems run efficiently and securely in cloud environments. Cloud engineers can also work on automation, monitoring, and cost optimization strategies to maximize the benefits of cloud computing for their organizations.

As cloud adoption continues to advance, the cloud engineer role is encompassing what was formerly known as the infrastructure engineer, with an initial focus on cloud and on-premises infrastructure management.

Platform Engineer

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) have emerged as the latest solution to the challenge of balancing developer productivity with system control and stability . Platform Engineers design and maintain IDPs to provide developers with self-service capabilities to independently manage operational aspects of the entire application lifecycle - from CI/CD workflows; infrastructure provisioning and container orchestration; monitoring, alerting and observability sex.

Many developers don’t want to do operations at all—at least not in the traditional sense. As a creative artist, a developer doesn't want to worry about how the infrastructure works. Therefore, it is critical that the platform is viewed as a product that enables control by creating a compelling self-service developer experience, rather than by enforcing standards and processes.

Disambiguation: Clarifying Role Expectations

So, where are the candidates for all these different roles? Perhaps for now (at least until DevOps implementation methods become more common), the only realistic answer is to make sure you ask everything you need to during the interview, being clear about the role expectations and the organizational context in which you will be hired.

For recruiters, you may decide to cast a wide net and fill your job postings with popular keywords for various reasons. But ultimately, details about the candidate's experience and abilities must emerge during the interview process and conversations with references.

In my opinion, whether you are a DevOps, platform engineer, cloud engineer, or even an SRE, ensuring that you support all of your developers’ operational needs will help help them focus on creating the next best product .

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