[davismwfl]

DevOps is not a backend developer. When I personally think of DevOps and what we view it as with my team is a person that is not purely a developer or purely traditional IT. Instead it is the person that can bridge those two roles and thinks differently about them both. A Good DevOps person should be able to interact with the dev team at all levels and provide insight to deployment options, strategies and structures, including code level details that might cause issues for deployment. At the same time that person must be well versed in the hardware, networking and automation tasks that will handle the raw deployment.

I can see a job description where many of the traits of a traditional backend developer are listed in the DevOps role, but they are not one in the same. That said, small teams will many times use a backend developer that has solid networking, hardware and automation skills to fill the DevOps role as well as his/her developer duties. We do that because we don't have the revenue yet to afford to separate those two positions.