I do think there are differences. If you read LISA papers there is obviously something fundamentally different about what we did when we were practicing system

I do think there are differences. If you read LISA papers there is obviously something fundamentally different about what we did when we were practicing system administration than what we were doing when we did devops. One of the fundamental shifts in my opinion was building APIs on top of sysadmin tasks. Provisioning a VM, installing an OS, getting software onto the server, configuring ingress/egress, handling process restarts, etc. These all were turned into tasks you could run from a developer’s laptop. But it was still a different skillset and devops dumped that skillset on developers (“Hey! Now, instead of opening a ticket, just write a 1000 line magical incantation of poorly understood YAML and the system can do it for you!”). Platform Engineering grew out of that pain. It’s the layer we are building on top of devops in a way. We are taking those APIs and treating them as foundations to build products that manage the SDLC lifecycle for developers. I think at its core, deveops was about “how much sysadmin work can we turn into an API and give to developers?” The answer turned out to be almost all of it. Then Platform Engineering is “now that we have APIs, how much can we automate away for developers.” We don’t know the answer yet, but suspect we will find the answer is also “almost all of it.” Site Reliability Engineering seems to be following a similar story arc and converging on Platform Engineering.