A lot of people have their own opinions on this. Here is what I know in practice from experience.

There is DevOps the practice and philosophy(think agile) in which people with software engineering and systems administration experience work on "the same team" to deliver and operate product and/or services. They form a matrix team with complimentary and overlapping skills.

Then there is DevOps the team. These are typically also staffed with people who have experience in both developing and operating systems. Typically they will not work so directly with the product developers though, and they will be more focused on developer tooling, system automation, and operations.

Finally there is the role DevOps. Most places envision this as a person with both systems and software development experience to work in any of the aforementioned teams. For many they were called "systems engineers" previously and simply go with the title flow. Often they are full-full-stack developers; they also work at the systems/operations level.

Some places have DevOps assembly lines though, and they are staffed and run like a technical support call center.. Or a ticket mill.. You get the idea.

I wonder that sometimes too. I came from the sysadmin world. I was always interested in that kind of stuff (like setting up my network at home) and cloud technology made it easy to learn while I had my first job in tech support.

Really I’m a “major cloud provider sysadmin” who learned a few DevOps things over a couple of months (Docker, Kubernetes, a good amount of PHP) to take jobs that offered big salaries...

Cloud Architect / Engineer roles usually will pay at least 20k less than whatever has DevOps in the title.

With a broad and crude brush: a sysadmin SSHes into a server and runs some commands to fix it. A DevOps submits a pull request against the automation software that broke it in the first place.

> What is the difference between 'DevOps' and a system administrator?

That "DevOps" is supposed to be so easy that an ordinary full-stack developer can pick it up and there is no need for expensive senior system administrators and especially DBAs (="the cloud will handle it for us").

True: when one relies on cloud-provided databases (Amazon RDS), the need for a DBA goes down a bit, especially with a decent support contract from the cloud provider.

But the other part, like how to configure a machine for maximum throughput, how to properly implement failover networking, how to do OS upgrades (and especially with Docker containers, how to keep the stuff in the images updated!) and most importantly how to write a Docker image that does not "just work" but is performant, upgradeable and doesn't place stuff around everywhere totally ignoring LSB... this needs Linux administration experience.

tl;dr: companies label it "devops" to save money for Linux/DB Admins, but this gamble can really fuck up when you suddenly do need the skillset of a real admin.

More ruby, less bash.

(Somewhat kidding)