I am recruiting devops engineers / SREs and am having trouble understanding their role in an organization. Bonus points for explaining Terraform, Python scr,ipting and Kubernetes. Thanks!
In: Engineering
It is a very hard position to define, I say that because this is my current title. It can mean different things for different organizations and even different parts of the same organization. It is a mix between developer and system administrator. You could say it is a developer who helps integrate the application into the production system, or a system administrator who develops tools to automate this job.
Scripting is the act of writing scripts, small applications which does simple things. You can kind of compare it to scribbling notes where you do not need fully finished documents. Python is a programming language which is commonly used to write scripts. DevOps engineers do a lot of scripting. A lot of the problems we are solving is very limited in scope where a small script is much faster to write and sufficient for the job. A system administator tend to not have to write as much logic and a developer usually deals with more complex problems that require more fully fledged programing techniques.
Terraform and Kubernetes are different tools used for deploying and operating software. There is a bit of overlap but in general terraform is used to set up cloud infrastructure, such as virtual machines, storage, networking, etc. while terraform is used to run small containers on those virtual machines. They both use a comprehensive configuration language where you specify how the world should look and then these tools make sure that it looks this way.
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