Type “devops” into any job search site today and the overwhelming majority of results will be for some variation of “DevOps Engineer”. The skills required will centre on tools like Puppet/Chef/Ansible, AWS/Azure, scripting in Python/Perl/Bash/PowerShell etc. Essentially, they’ve taken a deployment automation engineer role, crossed out “deployment automation” and written “DevOps” in its place.
There’s nothing wrong with hiring deployment automation (or, if you must, DevOps) engineers if you don’t have enough people with the right skills to deliver the deployment automation part of your DevOps strategy. The real problem is when hiring DevOps engineers is your DevOps strategy.
Deployment automation is an ancient art compared to DevOps. How ancient? Here’s an abbreviated history (feel free to skip to the tl;dr if you’re not a history buff):
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