[buster]

After giving it a thought, i'd say it's just a new buzzword for sysadmin.

Because, atleast in my understanding, it's totally in the working area of sysadmins to set up a server, install and configure software, configure monitoring, etc. The typical sysadmin will also write scripts and stuff to do that.

My bet is that it just came up by some angry sysadmins who felt like they need to differentiate from the dumber kind of admin who can barely touch a shell.

Of course a software developer may also write deployment scripts and similar stuff, so that's where it becomes fuzzy.

I never really thought about that term, but thanks to yyour question i just figured that i will drop the term from my vocabulary. It's too fuzzy, it's too much of a buzzword.