'Dev' in an 'Ops' Context: What the DevOps Title Gets Wrong

I could start by adding my thoughts to the already overwhelming debate about what DevOps is or isn’t. But honestly, that feels like a waste of time and energy. Instead, I’ll focus on what I know—my first-hand experience as a DevOps Engineer.

The Role

a way to unlock efficiency

When I decided to move into a DevOps role, I did so with intention. I wanted to learn more about operations—not for the sake of it, but to reduce toil, lag, bottlenecks, and the countless hurdles that slow teams down. I wanted to automate repetitive tasks that consumed development time, delayed feedback loops, and ultimately stood in the way of innovation. DevOps, for me, wasn’t a buzzword—it was a way to unlock efficiency.

What Should Be Automated?

reliable, repeatable, scalable code

At the heart of DevOps is automation. And that’s not surprising. The point is to speed up processes that would normally require human intervention, reduce errors through repeatability, and increase team velocity. But what kind of automation are we talking about?

• Integrating code changes
• Testing code changes
• Deploying code changes
• Monitoring those changes in production
• Notifying stakeholders, clients, or customers of updates
• Creating alerts and metrics to track code quality, regressions, and performance
• Proactively identifying errors and edge cases—then iterating

Sure, there are off-the-shelf tools to support these tasks. But more often than not, adapting those tools to your organisation’s unique needs takes time. Context matters. Use cases vary. And if it needs customisation, it probably needs automation—in part or in full. That’s where the DevOps Engineer comes in: someone with software engineering skills who understands the quirks of development process, operations and system administration, and can translate them into reliable, repeatable, scalable code.

Teams—Not Organisations

the aim is to accelerate the development process

The confusion around DevOps often comes from slapping the label on anything remotely related to operations or system administration. This largely stems from the rise of Infrastructure as Code. Tools like Terraform made it easy to equate “writing scripts + provisioning cloud infrastructure = DevOps.” Don’t get me wrong—Terraform, Bash, and cloud provisioning are important. But when your focus is solely on those things, it starts to look more like IT ops than DevOps. DevOps is fundamentally team-focused, not organisation-focused. The aim is to accelerate the development process. IT, on the other hand, leans more toward governance. Yes, a DevOps Engineer will deal with governance—permissions, access control, cloud infrastructure—but only as enablers of acceleration, not as the main goal.

The Evolution

Most development processes can be defined—and therefore automated. In an ideal world, everything would be. But code always brings with it the need for maintenance and updates. That said, depending on the size of your team and organisation, maintaining code written for automated processes shouldn’t be overwhelming. And when it is, the overflow should be considered part of regular developer duties. DevOps should be a shared culture, not a siloed job function.

So, What Is the Role of a DevOps Engineer?

someone with software engineering skills who understands the quirks of development process, operations and system administration

It’s a software engineering role, plain and simple—but with a mission: ensuring smooth, efficient development by building tools, automating processes, and championing developer experience. A DevOps Engineer should be able to:

• Write and debug code
• Monitor and debug systems
• Automate and optimise workflows
• Understand both software engineering and system operations deeply They don’t just “do DevOps”—they live the culture, lead by example, and make measurable improvements through automation. And while the title has been overused (and misused) for years, it's refreshing to see the industry starting to shift toward a more fitting term.

Enter: The Platform Engineer

Lately, there’s been a move to rebrand DevOps Engineers as Platform Engineers. And while this term has also been co-opted by marketing teams to mean “someone who builds Kubernetes clusters or administers and maintains Jenkins servers” 🙃, it still feels like a step in the right direction. It’s a clearer distinction from the IT operations roots that often cloud the meaning of DevOps. Quinnypig said it best:

I always found the term ‘DevOps’ to be kinda dumb, so it sure was nice of them all to rebrand as ‘Platform Engineering.’