As a former systems engineer who was still in that role when DevOps became a thing, I think there's a a more fundamental difference. The team I was on was made

As a former systems engineer who was still in that role when DevOps became a thing, I think there's a a more fundamental difference. The team I was on was made up of ops/engineering[1] people who knew how to code. We built tools to fill gaps or let us do things we couldn't do otherwise, but would typically use out-of-the-box functionality in third-party products by default because it was cheaper in the long term than building and supporting custom code. Maybe there's a better term for this, but I think of it as "OpsDev", and AFAIK it's more or less extinct. DevOps has always struck me as being developers[2] getting fed up with having to deal with a separate ops team, and building tools and platforms to automate away that ops team entirely. The two things can look superficially similar, because they achieve similar goals (automate away repetitive work, let people do more work), but the approaches are almost totally different. Kubernetes and Terraform do amazing things, but they are very obviously tools written by and for developers. I think it would be difficult and unwise to hand off first-tier support for issues involving them to a help desk, for example. It's pretty safe to write instructions for first-tier support to use a GUI or run a command but substitute the name of a server farm and a software package in the arguments, especially if the command is a script written by the engineering team to verify that the work makes sense before executing it. It's a lot less safe to try to have non-developers hand-edit source code, a script or even a YAML file and push the result to production. Both approaches work. They just require different kinds of people, and each has their own benefits and drawbacks, and IMO it's a mistake to put them both under one label. [1] "Engineers as in Geordi LaForge or Montgomery Scott": the people whose primary job is to keep the engine(s) running, respond to emergencies, make improvements where possible, and generally be a smart-person-of-all-trades. [2] "Engineers as in Burt Rutan": the people whose primary job is to design and build new products (for lack of a better word) from the ground up.