What's The Difference Between a Cloud Engineer and a DevOps Engineer?

October 9, 2025

Breaking down the roles, responsibilities, and career paths and DevOps engineers.

Last Updated: October 2025

If you're looking at cloud engineer jobs and DevOps jobs, you've probably noticed the titles get used interchangeably. Some companies call the same role "Cloud Engineer," others call it "DevOps Engineer." Sometimes it's even "Platform Engineer", sometimes it's "SRE" with the same responsibilities. So what's the actual difference? The short answer: it depends on the company. Some people like one more more than another, sometimes HR people use different titles for the same role. The longer answer involves understanding how these roles evolved, what they focus on, and where they overlap. This guide breaks down both roles, compares their responsibilities, and helps you figure out which path fits your career goals.

What Is a Cloud Engineer?

A cloud engineer builds, manages, and optimizes infrastructure on cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. The role emerged as companies migrated from on-premise data centers to public cloud providers, creating demand for engineers who understand cloud-native services, networking, security, and cost optimization, and how they vary from platform to platform.

Core Responsibilities

Cloud engineers typically handle:

Infrastructure provisioning: Designing and deploying virtual networks, compute instances, storage, databases, and managed services using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Bicep.
Cloud architecture: Choosing the right services for workloads (VMs vs containers vs serverless), designing for high availability and disaster recovery, and optimizing for performance and cost.
Security and compliance: Implementing IAM policies, network security groups, encryption, secrets management, and ensuring infrastructure meets regulatory requirements.
Monitoring and cost management: Setting up observability tools (CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Cloud Logging), tracking resource usage, and identifying cost optimization opportunities through rightsizing, reserved instances, and tagging.
Migration projects: Moving legacy applications from on-prem to cloud, refactoring apps to use cloud-native services, and coordinating with application teams on architecture changes.

Technologies Cloud Engineers Use

Cloud platforms: Deep expertise in at least one of AWS, Azure, or GCP, with knowledge of compute (EC2/VMs), networking (VPC/VNet), storage (S3/Blob), and databases (RDS/SQL).
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Bicep, or Pulumi to define infrastructure declaratively.
Scripting languages: Python, Bash, or PowerShell for automation tasks, custom integrations, and one-off scripts.
Networking fundamentals: Understanding of VPCs, subnets, routing tables, load balancers, DNS, firewalls, and hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect).

Career Path

Cloud engineers often come from sysadmin backgrounds or start as junior cloud engineers after earning certifications like AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Azure Administrator Associate. Career progression typically moves toward senior cloud engineer, cloud architect, or specialized roles like cloud security engineer.

What Is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer focuses on the collaboration between development and operations teams, automating software delivery pipelines, and improving deployment velocity and reliability. "DevOps" is a philosophy emphasizing automation, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and shared ownership of production systems. DevOps engineers are the practitioners who implement these principles.

Core Responsibilities

DevOps engineers typically handle:

CI/CD pipelines: Building and maintaining automated pipelines that test, build, and deploy code using tools like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.
Release automation: Implementing incremental release strategies like blue-green deployments, canary releases, and feature flags to reduce deployment risk.
Configuration management: Managing application configuration, secrets, and environment-specific settings across dev, staging, and production using tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or Kubernetes ConfigMaps.
Containerization and orchestration: Packaging applications in Docker containers and deploying them to Kubernetes or managed container platforms (ECS, AKS, GKE).
Monitoring and incident response: Setting up application performance monitoring, log aggregation, alerting, and participating in on-call rotations to troubleshoot production issues.
Collaboration and tooling: Working closely with developers to optimize build times, improve test coverage, and reduce friction in the software delivery process.

Technologies DevOps Engineers Use

CI/CD tools: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, or cloud-native options like AWS CodePipeline.
Containerization: Docker for building images, Kubernetes for orchestration, Helm for package management, and service meshes like Istio for advanced networking.
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform or cloud-native IaC tools to provision infrastructure alongside application deployments.
Monitoring and logging: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Datadog, or cloud-native solutions like CloudWatch and Azure Monitor.
Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, Go, or Ruby for automation scripts, custom tooling, and pipeline logic.

Career Path

DevOps engineers often transition from software engineering or system administration roles, picking up skills in automation, CI/CD, and infrastructure management. Career progression can lead to senior DevOps engineer, SRE (Site Reliability Engineer), or platform engineering roles.

Cloud Engineer vs DevOps Engineer: Key Differences

While the roles overlap significantly, here's where they typically diverge:

Area	Cloud Engineer	DevOps Engineer
Primary focus	Infrastructure design, cloud platform expertise, cost optimization	CI/CD pipelines, release automation, developer productivity - this can include on-prem
Daily work	Provisioning resources, configuring networking, managing IAM, optimizing costs	Building pipelines, debugging deployments, improving build times, on-call rotation
Tools	Terraform, cloud consoles, cost management tools, networking utilities	GitHub Actions/Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, monitoring dashboards
Collaboration	Works with architects, security teams, finance (FinOps), and infrastructure teams	Works closely with software developers, QA, product teams
Success metrics	Infrastructure uptime, cost per service, deployment speed, security compliance	Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), change failure rate
Certifications	AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Administrator, GCP Professional Cloud Architect	AWS DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer, GCP Professional DevOps Engineer

Where Cloud Engineers and DevOps Engineers Overlap

Despite the differences, cloud engineers and DevOps engineers share a lot of common ground:

Shared Responsibilities

Infrastructure as Code: Both roles use Terraform, CloudFormation, or Bicep to provision infrastructure, though cloud engineers may focus more on the architecture while DevOps engineers focus on integrating IaC into CI/CD workflows.
Automation: Whether it's automating infrastructure provisioning or deployment pipelines, both roles prioritize eliminating manual toil.
Monitoring and observability: Both set up metrics, logs, and alerts to ensure systems are healthy and performant.
Containerization: Docker and Kubernetes are common tools for both roles, though DevOps engineers may spend more time on application deployment while cloud engineers focus on cluster management and networking.
Security: Both implement security best practices-- cloud engineers secure the infrastructure layer (IAM, network policies, encryption), while DevOps engineers focus on secrets management, vulnerability scanning in CI/CD, and secure application configurations.

The Reality: Job Titles Don't Always Match Responsibilities

In practice, many people/companies use "Cloud Engineer" and "DevOps Engineer" interchangeably. A cloud engineer job at one company might be focused on CI/CD pipelines, a DevOps job at another might focus primarily on cloud infrastructure. The job description usually clears things up, but the interviews will if it doesn't.

How to Choose Between Cloud Engineer and DevOps Engineer Roles

If you're deciding which path is right for you, here are some factors to help you choose:

Choose Cloud Engineer If You:

Love infrastructure and cloud platforms: You enjoy learning about VPCs, IAM policies, managed services, and cloud architecture patterns.
Want deep cloud platform expertise: The material for certifications like AWS Solutions Architect or Azure Administrator interests you.
Prefer working on infrastructure over applications: You'd rather design resilient, scalable infrastructure than debug application code or build deployment pipelines.
Are interested in FinOps and cost optimization: You like analyzing cloud bills, identifying waste, and implementing cost-saving strategies.

Choose DevOps Engineer If You:

Enjoy automation and tooling: You prefer automation over infrastructure, building CI/CD pipelines and optimizing build times, and creating tools that improve developer workflows.
Like working closely with developers: You have a background as a software engineer and want to collaborate with other software engineers.
Prefer a faster feedback loop: DevOps roles often involve rapid iteration-- pushing code, testing deployments, fixing issues. Cloud engineering can involve longer-term infrastructure projects.

Consider SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) As a Third Option

If you're torn between cloud engineering and DevOps, also look at SRE roles. SREs focus on reliability, error budgets, incident response, and balancing new feature development with system stability. This is a good career path for people coming from SOC and NOC backgrounds. Keep in mind that it frequently involves on-call rotations.

Career Advice: Build Transferable Skills

Regardless of which title you target, focus on building skills that transfer across both roles:

Infrastructure as code: Terraform is the most portable IaC tool and works across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
CI/CD: Learn GitHub Actions or Jenkins to understand how code moves from commit to production.
Containerization: Docker and Kubernetes are essential for both cloud and DevOps roles.
Understand networking fundamentals: VPCs, subnets, routing, load balancers, and DNS are foundational knowledge for any cloud role.
Scripting: Python or Bash automation is critical for both roles.

For more guidance on breaking into the field, see how long does it take to become a cloud engineer and how to get a cloud engineering job with no experience.

The Bottom Line: The Roles Are Converging

There was a time when cloud and DevOps engineering were distinct; cloud engineers built infra and DevOps engineers built pipelines. These days, cloud/DevOps roles usually want someone who can do both. Thanks to more advanced software and managed services, one engineer today can usually do the work of a few engineers from a few years ago. If a company wants someone who can design and build cloud infrastructure, they probably want that person to understand build pipelines and how to deploy code to the infrastructure they built.

It doesn't matter if you're a "cloud engineer" or a "DevOps engineer", your manager will probably want you to provision infrastructure with Terraform, build CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, and deploy containerized apps to Kubernetes. As you climb the career ladder, it's likely you'll be asked to do both, or manage teams that are responsible for both.

For more career guidance, check out what does a cloud engineer do and cracking the cloud engineer interview.