Introduction
In this blog article we will dive into 2 popular engineering roles, Cloud engineer and DevOps engineer. We will compare these two and see exactly what are the differences and overlaps between the two 💪
"DevOps Engineer" and "Cloud Engineer"
Now there is a lot of mix up of these two engineering roles and many companies or even engineers often use them interchangeably. They mix the tasks and responsibilities of these two very often. There are for example plenty of job descriptions for "DevOps Cloud Engineer" or "Cloud DevOps Engineer", which would naturally make you think that they are the same role. But then why would you have two names for the same role? 🤔
And that's exactly what I'm going to discuss and clarify in this article.
Why use DevOps and Cloud Engineering Interchangeably
First of all, let's start by saying that DevOps and Cloud Engineers were originally meant as two different roles with different purposes and objectives.
But the reason people mix them up and even use them interchangeably is, because their responsibilities and tasks became more and more overlapping. This on the other hand happened, because many companies required their cloud engineers to take on the DevOps tasks and slowly move into a hybrid DevOps Cloud engineer role. So eventually, defining the boundaries between these roles became very difficult. 🙇🏽♂️
And because DevOps skillset is such a crucial role for many companies, DevOps engineers are extremely highly demanded and highly paid, and often the Cloud engineers are required to learn the DevOps skillset to expand their knowledge.
That's why we have 1,000s of engineers in our DevOps bootcamp, who are transitioning to DevOps or upskill in their existing engineering role, whether it's Cloud engineer or a Software engineer.
So in this article we're gonna talk about those overlaps, as well as the different objectives and tasks these 2 roles started with initially. Let's start with the objectives.
Objectives of DevOps and Cloud Engineers
DevOps Engineer Objective 🎯
DevOps Engineer's main objective is to make the process of releasing software fast, efficient, without bugs or issues and they achieve that by automating this whole process. So instead of manual steps of approving the release, testing the application changes, validating that everything works or making sure the security is configured etc.
So the DevOps engineers automate this whole process so that it's faster without manual human interaction points.
And I have a detailed video on that if you want to see exactly what DevOps Engineers tasks and responsibilities are. But in a nutshell that's the objective of a DevOps Engineer.
Cloud Engineer Objective 🎯
On the other hand, the cloud engineer's main objective is to create and manage infrastructure on cloud, so that applications that companies develop can run on it.
Now you're probably thinking: "create and manage cloud infrastructure? That sounds very vague and not really clear and specific". 🤨
Well let's clarify it.
The need for Cloud Engineers
If you think about AWS cloud platform, it is a massively powerfully platform that allows you to set up extremely complex IT infrastructure, with various AWS services on top, for mobile app development, machine learning, data science You can literally do anything on AWS. As an example, Netflix runs completely on AWS cloud platform.
So you have all these options, which is very powerful. But with so many options and so many services also comes the complexity, which means, sure, now you don't have to know how to set up an entire registry and set up database with backups from scratch or manager storage yourself, you can use the cloud services directly for those things.
But now you need to learn how to use those services and integrate them or plug them in into your applications. And those services are specific to the cloud platform that provides them.
So you need to learn how to use Kubernetes cluster service on AWS, which is called "EKS". Or you have to learn how to use and manage an image registry on AWS, called "ECR".
If you instead go for Azure or Google cloud or you move away from AWS to one of those platforms, now you have to learn how to use the equivalent service on Azure or Google Cloud, because they work a little bit differently.
And these platforms provide the same services, but they work differently and have different configuration options. So you have to learn all that specific to the platform. The same way you need to set up the underlying infrastructure, servers, firewall configuration, proxies for your application, security within your network, etc. So you need to learn AWS services, that allow all this configuration.
Cloud Engineer Tasks and Responsibilities
1) Configuration with Best Practices 🛠
And when you use those services, you don't just configure them so that your application runs on it, everything works and that's it. That's actually not enough. You need to configure it reliably and securely.
Because everything may be working fine, but you get millions of users visiting your application and now your whole setup crashes, because your application setup was not designed for such a high load. Or even more important, someone hacks into your setup, wiping out your data or completely messing up your whole setup. Or a new developer accidentally misconfigures something and ruins your AWS infrastructure setup.
So knowing this cloud specific services and how to configure them reliably, securely, in a proper way for your applications to run smoothly, these are exactly the tasks and responsibilities of a Cloud Engineer.
2) Cloud Platform specific knowledge 💡
I mentioned that cloud platforms are different and their services need to be configured differently. So you need a specific knowledge of that specific cloud provider to properly configure your infrastructure setup there.
This means as a Cloud Engineer, you usually specialize in one cloud platform and learn how to use their services. So you're kind of an expert in that cloud platform. That's why we usually have "AWS Cloud Engineer", "Azure Cloud Engineer" specializations.
Because of the complexity of such large cloud platforms and so many options, it's powerful, but complex. So there are lots of ways of misconfiguring things, so it's not that straightforward. That's why good Cloud Engineers who are able to configure things correctly with best practices, security, etc are so valuable.
And since Cloud Engineer has knowledge of all AWS Services, they know how to configure what company needs with those services. So they can directly map the company's business needs and requirements to the cloud setup:
Like if a company needs geographical distribution all over the world, because they have users all over the globe, Cloud Engineer would help configure that by using the right services and configuring them correctly.
Another example would be, if a company has a microservices application to deploy on cloud. Of course you need expertise in how to configure the cloud infrastructure to make sure a complex microservices application can run on it with production best practices, like redundancy, reliability security, data backup and restore mechanism. Again that's where the Cloud Engineering skills and expertise is needed. 💪
3) Automation using Infrastructure as Code 🚀
And finally cloud services and infrastructure can get very complex very fast. Which means you don't want to be managing and configuring or creating things in a complex cloud setup manually.
You don't want people joining your company or your cloud team wondering, how the whole infrastructure was created, how it's configured, what's configured, where and why. So you need some transparency of your infrastructure setups as well. And also making sure when someone joins in the cloud engineering team, they can easily get on board and not accidentally misconfigure stuff or ruin the existing setup and so on.
And in case things break, in a cloud setup you want to be able to replicate the same cloud configuration again and recover the setup quickly without having to remember exactly what you did to configure the current setup and what exactly needs to be done.
And that's where infrastructure as code or in short "IaC" comes in.
So Cloud Engineers would automate a lot of their own tasks for infrastructure creation and maintenance using infrastructure as code. Because when you have really complex setups, after some point you can't possibly manually manage that anymore. So you will 100 percent need to have some automation.
Differences and Overlaps between DevOps and Cloud Engineer 👀
Differences between DevOps and Cloud Engineer
Now going back to the original comparison between DevOps Engineer and Cloud Engineer.
DevOps Engineers automate software release process to make it faster, while Cloud Engineers automate cloud infrastructure and management to make companies cloud infrastructure reliable, fast and secure easily recoverable and so on.
So obviously two very different objectives. 😌 But here is the massive overlap ⬇️
Overlaps between Cloud and DevOps Engineer
Part of software release is its deployment on servers, on infrastructure. So if companies deploying its applications to cloud, DevOps Engineers responsibility naturally becomes to make sure the cloud infrastructure is configured and managed properly so that application can be deployed fast, the automated testing can be run, and deployments can be validated with blue green or canary deployment strategies and so on.
So DevOps Engineer's job would extend to managing the underlying infrastructure, monitoring that is working fine so the applications can be deployed and run successfully, making sure that it's secure, it's not running out of resources, that it's geographically distributed and so on. If application is running in Kubernetes cluster managed by AWS, DevOps engineer would make sure the cluster is running fine, that it's correctly configured with security in place, that we have proper backups for all our application data, cluster configuration and so on.
And again DevOps is about automating things to be fast and efficient, so DevOps Engineers would also use infrastructures code tools to automate infrastructure management monitoring etc.
So as you see the cloud infrastructure management that directly affects how fast the application can be released, deployed, recovered and so on is also part of DevOps Engineers tasks. And that's where the main overlap happens. So from this perspective it seems like DevOps kind of includes some of the Cloud Engineers tasks.
So companies usually just hire "DevOps Cloud Engineer", who does everything. 😏
However if the responsibility becomes too broad for 1 engineer to do it all, from release management, to infrastructure management, to backup and restore management, cost oversight etc, we can have these roles separately.
So we have additional Cloud Engineer role, that is dedicated to cloud services and managing them and should actually be a help for DevOps Engineer to help each other in their own objectives.
Working together 👏
So the objective of Cloud Engineer, which is reliable secure infrastructure also affects the DevOps Engineer's objective of releasing applications fast, because they have to run on that infrastructure.
Which means Cloud Engineer takes care of managing infrastructure and makes sure it runs reliably, so DevOps engineer can build automated processes on top of that to release the applications and run them on that reliable properly configured cloud infrastructure.
And you can even use the controls that Cloud Engineer configured to monitor the application to do the automated validation, implement deployment strategies and so on.
In our DevOps bootcamp, we cover all these overlapping skillset, so no matter whether you want to become a DevOps engineer or a Cloud engineer, you will need to learn those skills to become a highly valuable engineer.
So if you want to take the next step of actually mastering these skills, enroll in our DevOps bootcamp and let's make you a top-notch engineer! 🎉 💪
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