Has DevOps Outgrown Being a Job Title?

Ask ten companies what a “DevOps Engineer” does and you’ll get ten different answers. In some places it means writing Terraform. In others it’s owning CI/CD pipelines, or managing Kubernetes clusters, or being the person developers throw tickets at when something doesn’t deploy. The title has become a catch-all — and in becoming everything, it’s started to mean nothing.

I’ve held variations of this title. I don’t use it to describe myself anymore.

Getting Started with Terraform

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by HashiCorp that lets you define and provision infrastructure using a declarative configuration language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). Rather than clicking through a cloud console or writing imperative scripts, you describe the end state you want and Terraform figures out how to get there.

Why Terraform?

• Cloud-agnostic — Works with AWS, GCP, Azure, and hundreds of providers including Cloudflare, GitHub, and Datadog
• State management — Tracks what’s actually deployed via a state file, so it knows what needs to change
• Plan before apply — Preview exactly what will be created, modified, or destroyed before anything happens
• Declarative — You describe what you want, not how to create it
• Idempotent — Running the same configuration multiple times produces the same result

Installing Terraform

On macOS with Homebrew: