[cbushko]

Folks tend to get so upset about the title of "DevOps". I am unsure if it is because of:

  - just dealing with bad Ops engineers at work that "don't do much"
  - employees taking advantage of the DevOps movement to make more money
  - System Administrators complaining that 'this is what we have always done'

System Administrators, though skilled, had a much different mindset in the 90s when I worked closely with them. They were more focused on keeping Sun hardware running and keeping the SAN from filling up. That server room was their 'production'. They were still on call for when a server went down and it took days for a new server to be rebuilt. The best of them wrote scripts to make their lives easier but that wasn't often the focus. They were too busy keeping the systems running to automate much of it.

I find that DevOps is a different level of abstraction compared to Sys Admins. In general, they do not need to know how to build a server and fight with the OS as they can use tooling to spin up 100s of machines in the cloud. The amount of knowledge they need is much broader and less specialized than a System Administrator. Where the Sys Admin would need to know the ins and outs of Cisco Routers, the DevOps engineer only needs to know how to use a Load Balancer. If lucky, there is a tool that makes it easy to create them.

I find the list in the guide to be quite accurate but you do not need to be a master of everything in the list.