> The further I get into studying deployments/DevOps methods the more surprised I am that the balance has shifted rather strongly towards configuring tools from

> The further I get into studying deployments/DevOps methods the more surprised I am that the balance has shifted rather strongly towards configuring tools from third party infrastructure vendors and away from what most would call software engineering. This is kind of an arbitrary line to draw. You can learn the ins and outs of Nginx, but that's also "configuring a tool" rather than "software engineering". Of course, the advantage of something like Nginx is that it works on any Linux box, so you're not locked into your third-party infrastructure vendor. But most front end frameworks are compatible with many "one step app deployment" vendors, as long as you're careful to avoid any proprietary features.