Despite certain departments performing similar functions, DevOps and System Administration overlap but remain two separate roles in many respects. System Administration, the primary focus of traditional SysAdmins, involves maintaining and ensuring the availability of an organization’s technology resources and infrastructure. In contrast, DevOps Engineers dedicate their efforts to continuous integration and continuous delivery processes, fostering collaboration between development and operations teams as proponents of agile software delivery.
- SysAdmins’ traditional duties include things like installing and configuring physical servers and operating systems, applying security updates (patching), and other general support. They deal more with ‘keeping the lights on’ and working on the availability, stability, and maintenance of systems. There is hardly any other kind of automation used other than writing some shell scripts for such basic activities, and most of the time, it is the case of SysAdmins waiting for something to break in order to fix it.
- For example, they may write a backup shell script or check to see if a server is healthy. Experience shows that such professionals know how to use, put together, and generally work with server machines, OSs, networking, and some server-related bash or power shell scripts.
- To put it in DevOps terms, it focuses on the joining of development and operations to bring about a clear and straightforward way of delivering code changes to live environments. DevOps engineers are skilled in the use of party software such as Jenkins, Ansible, and Terraform to automate the system setup, as well as the CI/CD pipeline, configuration management, and provision of the infrastructure. In contrast with regular SysAdmins, DevOps Engineers perform in advance to come up with processes that enable the delivery of new features at satisfactory levels.
- They also tend to use Terraform, one of the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tools, to encapsulate the architecture within the code under a version control system. This enables the architecture to be easily reproduced and expanded across different environments. Another advantage is that monitoring has become more advanced and affordable thanks to technologies such as Prometheus and Grafana, which allow for real-time monitoring of applications, ensuring rapid diagnosis and resolution of performance-related issues.
- To summarize, SysAdmins focus on building and maintaining robust systems, whereas DevOps Engineers design automated processes for a continuous development culture. This distinction has rendered both roles vital in today’s IT work environments, although each has a different set of responsibilities and required knowledge.
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