Understanding the Differences of DevOps Engineer vs Software Engineers

Quick Summary: DevOps and software engineers have many differences especially in terms of their distinct job roles. You will understand all the differences between DevOps and software engineers in this blog. It will help you determine whether you should choose DevOps engineers or software engineers for your organization. Keep reading to get useful insights.

Modern software development teams are more vibrant with diverse roles and expertise. Often these teams include a large number of professionals with different but overlapping roles. People are often confused with the titles of these IT experts. One such confusion comes with the roles of DevOps and software engineers.

Although both DevOps engineers and software engineers share some similarities in their roles, they are totally two different specialists. Both DevOps and software engineers are involved in the process of deploying and releasing software. However, DevOps engineers have a broader scope than software engineers who are focused on the development tasks exclusively.

Companies that are ready to adopt DevOps culture need to hire DevOps programmers who collaborate with the software engineers to expedite software development and release. They play their roles independently and help an organization meet their customer needs efficiently.

Keep reading for a complete comparison of software developers vs DevOps engineers to know what differentiates them from each other.

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What is a Software Engineer?

A software engineer is primarily focused on software product design and development. They use different tools and programming languages to code and build software. In addition, they are also responsible for software debugging, maintenance, and testing.

Software is everything from the apps that run on your phone to the web applications that are accessed via web browsers. Software engineers are those experts who use their skills to create software. They solve complex problems and implement algorithms, data structures, and programming styles to build software.

The jobs of software engineers are broadly divided as follows:

• Coding software by using programming languages, frameworks, and other tools.
• Performing tests to ensure software performance, quality, security, and functionality.
• Software maintenance by debugging and resolving errors in the code.

What is a DevOps Engineer?

DevOps is a blend of Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops). And a DevOps engineer is an IT professional who closes the gap between development and operation teams.

The roles of DevOps engineers are as follows:

• They provide automation from building and testing software to deployment.
• Facilitate collaboration between the development and the deployment teams.
• Monitor software deployed in the production to track performance and issues.

DevOps vs Software Engineer: Complete Comparison of Two Specializations

The comparison of software developer vs DevOps engineer is like comparing a CEO with a department head. Both have their own responsibilities and skillset, but they work at different levels. Similarly, DevOps engineers and software developers work at different levels with their own roles and skills. This section provides a full comparison between developers and DevOps engineers to understand the differences.

Comparing DevOps vs software engineers can be useless because they are professionals who work together in a single team and often depend on each other. Software developers create applications and DevOps engineers manage the environments in which the developers work. Moreover, the following are the major differences between DevOps and software developers.

DevOps vs Software Engineer: Responsibility

The primary responsibility of DevOps engineers is to automate software development workflow and streamline the SDLC. Apart from this, DevOps engineers also play an important role in smooth deployment and functioning of software.

So, a DevOps engineer’s work profile involves creating web servers, implementing testing automation, and deploying applications. This professional uses a wide range of DevOps tools and technologies to automate and orchestrate software development lifecycle.

This is the major difference between DevOps and software engineers that defines their scope of work. Moreover, the responsibility of a software engineer involves software designing, developing, and testing. So, their roles typically revolve around coding and implementing algorithms.

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DevOps vs Software Engineer: Scope

DevOps engineers have a broader scope as they work through the entire software development lifecycle and beyond. They are involved in processes ranging from the development stage to production. DevOps engineers also optimize infrastructure and monitor software for problems.

Working in a continuous deployment environment, they swiftly release software to production. On the other hand, software developers are involved only in the development phase and their role is over once a software is deployed. The operations team takes care of the rest after this.

However, DevOps engineers work with both development and operation teams. So, comparing DevOps vs software developers, the latter has a narrower work scope than the former.

DevOps vs Software Engineer: Skills

Software and DevOps engineers possess different sets of skills and knowledge enabling them to perform different tasks in their respective fields. Since DevOps engineers remove silos between the development and operation teams, their skillset can be expected to have coding and system administration.

They have a good understanding of IT infrastructure and networking. DevOps engineers handle system scripting, so they are required to be proficient in scripting languages like BASH and Python. They must have strong skills in containerization tools like Kubernetes and Docker as well as CI/CD implementation tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, etc.

Software developers need to have a strong knowledge of programming languages and coding practices. They also possess skills in algorithms and data structures. Besides this, they require software skills like problem solving, teamwork, and attention to detail.

DevOps vs Software Engineer: Approach

Both DevOps and software engineers follow a different approach in software development and release cycles. Typically, software developers work with an agile approach where they create code, test it, and iterate this process until the desired results are achieved. Developers are focused on creating quality code to build applications that are easy to maintain and scale.

On the other side, DevOps engineers focus on infrastructure optimization, automating processes, and making sure that software runs smoothly. They work with the continuous delivery approach enabling them to quickly release software as soon as they are ready. It allows teams to build and deploy software quickly and with minimal risks.

Let’s go through some of the major differences between DevOps Experts vs Software Engineers in detail now.

The primary difference between DevOps engineer vs software engineer is, that the DevOps engineer focuses on integrating development and operations to enhance the delivery pipeline, whereas the software engineer focuses on designing, writing code, and testing software applications.

Talking about the difference between DevOps engineers and software developers, DevOps engineers are responsible for managing the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of applications, whereas software developers are responsible for developing and maintaining software apps with clean and efficient coding practices.

In the comparison of software engineer vs DevOps engineer, software engineer is skilled in multiple programming languages, algorithms, data structures, and software design patterns; in contrast, the DevOps engineer is proficient in scripting, automation tools, CI/CD, cloud services, and infrastructure management.

The goal of a DevOps engineer is to streamline and automate the software delivery process for faster releases, whereas the software developer is responsible for creating efficient and user-friendly software solutions.

The following table provides a quick understanding of DevOps vs Software Engineers.

DevOps Engineers vs Software Engineers: Which One to Choose?

Choosing between DevOps engineers and software engineers will majorly depend on your business requirements. In this fast-paced world, customer needs and preferences change overnight. Given this speedy transition in customer needs, you must quickly adapt your software to these changes to stay in the game. DevOps offers an efficient approach for this as it ensures close cooperation between the development and operations teams.

On the other hand, software engineers are the actual people who code your software from scratch or on top of a framework. Today’s organizations adopt DevOps to boost the capabilities of their software engineers with automation to build and deliver software more quickly. Software engineers don’t work in isolation, they become an integral part of the DevOps team. You can rely on a team of software engineers if your project is small and doesn’t require frequent changes. But for large software with constant changes can be handled with an efficient team like DevOps.

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Wrapping UpNow that you have seen the differences between DevOps and developers, you can reach a better conclusion about their roles and importance. Both of these professionals perform distinct functions that are crucial to developing and releasing software. DevOps engineers introduce processes and tools that aid in the creation, testing, and deployment of software solutions.Software engineers build software that is released with the processes and tools defined by DevOps engineers. Both software and DevOps engineers are partners who work collaboratively to build and release software solutions. If you are looking for DevOps implementation services, you can choose Radixweb for excellent services.We help you empower your software teams and bridge the gaps between the development and IT operations. Our DevOps experts are proficient in a wide range of tools including Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, etc, to help you automate processes. Contact us for DevOps consultation or to hire software developers.