Explainer
What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
A DevOps engineer builds and maintains the systems that get code from a commit to production safely. Here's what that actually covers day to day.
CI/CD pipelines
Building and maintaining the automated pipelines that test, build, and deploy code , so releases don’t depend on a person running manual steps.
Cloud infrastructure
Setting up and managing infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP, compute, networking, storage, and everything in between, usually defined as code rather than clicked together manually.
Containers and orchestration
Packaging applications into containers and, at a certain scale, orchestrating them with tools like Kubernetes.
Monitoring and incident response
Setting up monitoring and alerting so problems are caught early, and being part of the response when something breaks in production.
Security
Managing access control, secrets, and vulnerability scanning as part of the infrastructure and deployment process, not as an afterthought.
Automation, broadly
Replacing manual, repetitive operational work with scripts and systems that do it reliably and consistently instead.
Common questions
They overlap, but DevOps engineering puts more emphasis on automation, CI/CD, and treating infrastructure as code, rather than manual server management.
Some do, but the primary focus is usually infrastructure, automation, and the systems that support application code, not the application itself.
Both, it's a set of practices, and also a common job title for engineers who focus on applying them.
Related reading & services
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