As the old saying goes, there's nothing new under the sun. DevOps is very closely related to sysadmin work. I think it would be fair to say that DevOps is just

As the old saying goes, there's nothing new under the sun. DevOps is very closely related to sysadmin work. I think it would be fair to say that DevOps is just a specialized form of sysadmin work. You could even say that it is just an approach to sysadmin work. DevOps means using orchestration and automation tools to perform sysadmin tasks, rather than doing everything by hand. It's a layer atop the tools that sysadmins are used to using. The "dev" part of the term relates to the "infrastructure as code" concept. This concept dictates that your infrastructure should be defined as code that outputs your infrastructure. Depending on how far along you are in your sysadmin career, and depending on the size of the organization you work in, this may be nothing new, but more recent DevOps efforts extend this to organizations of much smaller size. For example, it is not unusual for environments requiring only a handful of servers (or even one!) to use a fully automated provisioning and deployment toolchain. Ultimately, you can make the argument that this is nothing new. You can do that with just about anything. "DevOps" is not a provable assertion; it is a refinement of the language used to describe the jobs we do.