“DevOps” is a recently coined term that combines the realm of “development” with that of “operations.” So in theory, a DevOps engineer is someone who is proficient in both of these arenas and understands how they interact with each other. In reality, however, most DevOps engineers work on the “operations” side of things on a day-to-day basis. They understand enough about how software is written and how it works to smoothly integrate a given piece of software into a larger operational workload, and most DevOps engineers do work on system administration tasks. But there is a difference between a modern DevOps engineer and a sysadmin insofar as the DevOps engineer focuses on automation and cloud architectures.
Automation is achieved through a number of means, including continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), configuration management, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC), to name just the main ones. This article will explore some of the primary tools that DevOps engineers actually use today.