The software development landscape is always evolving, and with it, so are the roles and responsibilities of those who spend their days (and often their nights) building, deploying, and maintaining applications.
In recent years, we've seen the rise of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and —most recently— Platform Engineering, as key disciplines in modern software development.
But what exactly are these roles, how do they differ, and how are they evolving? Is there a better way to collaborate, or does an infrastructure-as-code skills gap stand in the way of a more efficient cloud? What should cloud practitioners be doing, learning, and looking out for?
Here’s a comprehensive answer to all those questions, and more.
DevOps: The Foundation (Or Is It?)
When DevOps burst onto the scene, it smashed through the walls that once separated development and operations teams. But let’s get one thing straight, DevOps isn’t a department. And it’s not just a set of practices; it's a cultural revolution that's turned the software world on its head — right at the moment when we really started needing to play matchmaker between dev and ops teams.
DevOps engineers, however, are tasked with:
- Automating everything that moves (and even some things that don't)
- Building CI/CD pipelines faster than you can say "deploy"
- Cranking up software delivery speed to maximum levels
According to a survey by Puppet, high-performing DevOps organizations deploy code 208X more frequently and have 106X faster lead times than their low-performing counterparts. But DevOps engineers can’t work in a silo — and they shouldn’t.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Because "Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again?" Doesn't Cut It
While DevOps was busy breaking down walls, Site Reliability Engineering (a term coined by Google in 2003) started making waves of its own.
SREs are the unsung heroes who:
- Juggle Service Level Objectives (SLOs) like the pros they are
- Build powerful monitoring systems you can rely on
- Conduct comprehensive post-incident reviews
- Automate toil faster than you can say "repetitive task"
You can think of SREs like the Special Forces of the tech world: elite, highly trained, and ready to tackle the toughest reliability challenges.
Platform Engineering: The Secret Sauce of Developer Productivity
Platform engineering is technically the new kid on the block: a relatively nascent discipline that’s all about empowering developers and making their lives easier.
But today, we’re seeing a continued maturity of platform engineering, with 43% of organizations reporting they have had a Platform Engineering team in place for at least 3-5 years (according to the 2024 State of DevOps Report from Puppet).
Platform engineers are the ones building and maintaining the tools, workflows, and infrastructure that development teams need to be productive: creating internal developer platforms that abstract away complexity and provide self-service capabilities.
These experts are responsible for:
- Architecting scalable cloud-native infrastructure
- Crafting developer-friendly tools so slick, they practically use themselves
- Standardizing deployment processes across entire organizations
- Optimizing resource utilization like they're playing a high-stakes game of Tetris
And today, the Platform Engineering market is hot.
We're talking a projected annual growth rate of 23.7% from 2024 to 2030 for a market that was already valued at over $5.5B in 2023.
The DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering Tango
Now, we know what they do and why, but how do these teams work together? Imagine a three-legged race, but instead of awkwardly stumbling towards a finish line, these disciplines are sprinting towards the future of software development in perfect harmony.
Let's break it down:
- All three roles are automation addicts. They're constantly looking for ways to streamline processes, eliminate manual tasks, and make machines do the heavy lifting. It's like they're building an army of robot helpers, but for code.
- Gone are the days of developers throwing code over the wall and hoping for the best. These roles thrive on communication and breaking down silos.
- DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering professionals are never satisfied with the status quo. It’s all about continuous improvement. They're always pushing the envelope, optimizing processes, and finding new ways to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their systems.
- As organizations grow, so does the complexity of their systems. These roles are the ones guiding companies through graceful and disruption-free scalability, ensuring that applications can handle any amount of user traffic.
Accomplishing much of this work relies on having a standardized way to provide, define, and manage infrastructure using code — all in pursuit of taming modern cloud chaos.
That’s infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Shifting Responsibility: How IaC Management is Changing (And Why It Matters)
These days, how is IaC shaking things up for DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and SREs? Their challenges are unique, but tend to overlap. And over time, the onus for managing IaC has fallen on different teams.
Here’s what the breakdown looks like today.
Still, despite shifting responsibilities for IaC, their paths all lead toward the same shared goal: tighter collaboration, improved efficiency, and a better way to manage cloud chaos — together.
For DevOps Engineers: IaC is like finding the Holy Grail of automation.
No more "It works on my machine" shenanigans. Thanks to IaC, DevOps engineers can count on the fact that consistent environments will appear across dev, test, and prod. That means there’s a lower risk of environment-related issues. Version control, collaboration, rapid deployment and scalability are also major advantages.
By treating infrastructure as code, DevOps engineers can track changes, collaborate effectively, and maintain a historical record of infrastructure modifications. This promotes transparency and accountability within the team. Plus, IaC allows DevOps engineers to quickly provision and scale infrastructure resources, significantly reducing the time required for environment setup and enabling faster time-to-market for applications.
For Platform Engineers: IaC is the ultimate LEGO set.
When it comes to standardization and reusability, platform engineers can create infrastructure templates and modules using IaC, ensuring consistency across different projects and teams. This also promotes best practices and reduces the learning curve for new team members.
IaC also allows platform engineers to abstract away the complexities of underlying infrastructure, providing developers with easy-to-use, self-service capabilities for provisioning resources. Over time, with IaC, platform engineers can iterate on and improve infrastructure designs more easily, implementing updates across multiple environments with minimal effort.
For SREs: IaC is the Swiss Army knife of reliability.
For SREs, IaC is invaluable for maintaining system reliability and performance: making good on the promise of immutable infrastructure, foolproof disaster recovery, and consistent monitoring and observability.
That means you can say goodbye to configuration drift and hello to enhanced system stability. Plus, deploy monitoring tools consistently across environments, and it’s like you’re peeking into the future of your system's health.
DevOps, Platform, and SREs: Leveling Up Modern Software Delivery Together
By leveraging IaC, DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and SREs can work together more efficiently, delivering more reliable and scalable systems while reducing operational overhead and improving overall productivity.
Why?
- IaC gives everyone a common language to describe infrastructure.
- With IaC, everyone can contribute to infrastructure definitions.
- Rapid provisioning of test environments means quicker feedback on changes.
- Version-controlled IaC lets the whole team propose and implement improvements.
It’s also driving tons more engineering efficiency (both for platform and software engineers) and improving reliability and compliance, too.
Despite the big value that lies in leveraging IaC, though, there’s still a big skills gap dampening the potential at hand.
Bridging Knowledge Gaps: The Skills That Pay the Bills
With so much change happening, you may be wondering "What skills do I need to thrive in this new, modern era of cloud?"
Fortunately, we understand what skills many engineers feel they lack (hint: IaC literacy is a pervasive problem). And we’ve also compiled a rundown of the must-have skills for aspiring DevOps engineers, SREs, and Platform Engineers:
- Coding Chops: Whether it's Python, Go, or good old Bash scripting, you need to be comfortable slinging code like a digital cowboy. (Warning: that doesn’t mean you go cowboy in the console)
- Cloud Mastery: AWS, Azure, GCP — pick your poison. Or choose multiple. Cloud platforms are the playgrounds of modern software development.
- Container Sorcery: Docker, Kubernetes, and their ilk are the building blocks of today's applications. Get comfortable with containerization or get left behind.
- Monitoring Eyes: From Prometheus to Grafana, knowing how to keep a watchful eye on your systems is crucial.
- All Things Automation: If you find yourself doing the same task twice, it's time to automate. Tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Jenkins should be your best friends.
With tools like Firefly, automation is the name of the game, multi-cloud and multi-IaC environments are no problem, and automatic codification —powered by AI— is already a reality.
📹 Watch for an overview of how Firefly works ↓
(To see Firefly in action for yourself, explore our sandbox environment, or request a demo).
Blending Disciplines: What’s To Come?
DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering represent different facets of modern software development and operations, but they all contribute to the common goal of building and maintaining reliable, scalable, and efficient software systems.
As the software industry continues to evolve, professionals in these fields must stay adaptable and committed to continuous learning. By embracing the principles and practices of DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering, organizations can position themselves for success — especially if they’ve already established an organization-wide Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE).
As we move forward, the lines between these disciplines may blur, but their collective impact on the industry will undoubtedly continue to grow, especially if IaC continues to give them the tools and the recipe to move fast, risk-free, and confident.
