From my perspective DevOps is about combining development and operations into one coherent group or team capable of delivering applications from the initial concept all the way until production, and then, also making sure that it continues running in production right. I think it’s about creating those self-sufficient teams.
Platform engineering is about creating internal tooling, an internal platform that is tailor-made for the needs of a company that combines all the tools the company uses, and creates that abstraction layer on top that simplifies usage for everybody else.
A person might have seven years of experience in Terraform but it’s unrealistic to expect that everybody will know everything about it, and even more unrealistic that everybody will know everything about AWS, Azure, and so on, so Platform engineers are in charge of developing such internal tooling that simplifies specific processes in a company, and enables everybody else to do things instead of opening Jira tickets.
The question that keeps coming up is if DevOps is a sustainable career or if is DevOps dead?.
From my perspective, in the last 20 years, I’ve been a Computer Technician, Java developer, Java Senior developer, Network Administrator, Sysadmin, Software engineer, DevOps engineer, SRE, and probably some other things. But in all of those, I’ve done the same thing, I’ve implemented things to help businesses to be more profitable and to grow.
So the title really doesn’t matter, as long as you focus on adding value, you’re always going to have a job. So is DevOps dead? I don’t know. And I don’t really care. And sincerely, I don’t think you should either.
