Career Choices – Webops vs Devops
3 min readIf you’re interested in a career in online development, you have probably wondered about the different options out there. Webops and devops are two popular fields, but what is the difference? If you’re curious about webops vs devops, read on to learn more about each field and how they are linked together.
Webops vs Devops
Devops is a movement that is focused on the idea of collaboration between developers and operations. Devops teams are focused on helping companies ship reliable code and ensuring that the teams are able to keep things running smoothly. They put the focus on deployment and stability. Monitoring, testing and logging are things that devops may be involved in.
Webops is slightly more varied and slightly more hand-on. A webops person would need to understand the fundamentals of network layers and web application development, firewalls, load balancers and HTTP Routing. They are unlikely to do much actual coding themselves, but they should understand the resources that are needed to make a web application scale effectively and run well.
Webops Gets More Hands-On
In most cases, the webops team will have the opportunity to get more hands-on than a devops team. They work with the SRE team to ensure the site and project’s reliability, and they will be more involved with the day to day maintenance of the application and servers, and handling issues with stability, scaling, load, firewalls, etc.
Most companies have some form of SRE in place even if they don’t have a department dedicated to it. They also probably do some ‘webops’ on an ongoing basis, even if it is not formal. As your applications get more complex and the work that you are doing becomes more demanding, with more queries, more users, and more resources being consumed, it becomes more important to have a proper team on your side.
For smaller and medium-sized companies, there is often no need to have a true webops team. A lot of the work can be outsourced. With the right monitoring and analytics tools, a third party can manage a lot of the common issues for you. This is particularly true for cloud applications where you can spin servers up and down as and when you need to.
Choosing a Specialism
If you are interested in this side of computing, networking, and development, then you should consider what you want out of an average day in your working life. Are you a ‘big picture’ person, are you interested in networks, or are you interested in doing the nitty-gritty. Developers and testers zoom right in on a problem, while webops do more of the day to day management, and devops sit another ‘layer’ removed from them. They all face unique challenges, and large projects would not survive without them. It helps, as you focus on your career if you can try to have an understanding of all of the jobs so that you can see where your work fits in, and communicate effectively with people in any department necessary.
