Devops is a practice not a role. Essentially it’s bringing good software engineering practice to operations and eliminating the silos. In practice, though, this does usually mean programmers fannying around with docker.
Some organisations just rebranded the ops team to the devops team, but that’s kinda missing the point.
I'm actually perplexed why the people in our ops team have the title DevOps Engineer, when they don't do any dev work, just handle all aws related stuff.
I asked one of them this question, but couldn't get any answer that satisfied my curiousity.
EDIT: For what it's worth I don't view myself as a software developer or operations or systems administrator or frontend or backend or fullstack. I like to think of myself as a Problem Solver. It just so happens that I'm currently paid to solve software engineering problems.
I want to know everything from Dockerfiles to bash scripting to assembly to functional programming to DDD, etc.
I have asked this question myself, and after failing to get an appropriate answer, I started using "DevOps Administrator" instead of "Engineer" in my email signature. It feels more appropriate since I definitely do not write production code.
