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Production engineering: "Production engineering is a combination of manufacturing technology, engineering sciences with management science." (Wikipedia)

Is there any relationship to/with DevOps?

To avoid an opinionated discussion, please establish, formalize with facts and use references in your answers.

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    "To avoid an opiniated discussion, please establish, formalize with facts and use references in your answers." sorry, no. If I am only allowed to post if I find those facts on the internet first, then I respectfully ask you to look for them yourself... that would also be much faster for you, very likely?
    – AnoE
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 21:21
  • I have been looking for longer time. The answer below regarding facebook is helpful (have to accept this as reference to a company arlt least). Referencing own experience does not require googling.
    – Ta Mu
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 11:18
  • How can "own experience" factor into "relationship between production engineering and DevOps"? The question, as stated now, is more applicable to definitions, not experience. Wikipedia, especially the rest of their page on it, sounds very far away from DevOps, unless you simply mean "build a production facility = dev", "keep the facility running = ops", which is kind of obvious (and still very unconcrete; I would only call it "relationship" in the vaguest sense). Calling Facebook servers a "production engineering" topic seems very weird to me indeed; that's just plain operations.
    – AnoE
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 11:50
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    @AnoE I read it as a “I’m not asking for opinions, please don’t close my question”. ie standard Stack Exchange stuff. People who know what to search for can find the answer much faster than those who are asking the question.
    – Tim Malone
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 21:20
  • So, if there should turn out to be no relationship, how would one "formalize with facts and use references"? I'm trying to help OP by pointing out that there's a problem with his question - he might want to make the question more clear, specific, and especially not in a "yes/no" format as it is now.
    – AnoE
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 21:49

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This is opinionated I feel. But for me I think the relation between the 2 is actually a massive mistake made by a lot of companies. There are a ton of software-systems hybrid jobs out there, and I've worked both ends of the spectrum, and in between. DevOps is a buzzword and it's new and shiny, so everything that falls in that realm is instantly deemed DevOps. I would argue that the same description you might give for a Production Engineer would sound exactly like what most people think DevOps is, when in reality DevOps(beware of opinions) is providing tooling for development to leverage and deliver to infrastructure. You are developing the operations of software shipping to and running on a platform. This makes a very diverse role, and that's why I think DevOps is more so a position than a profession. I consider myself a Software Engineer, but I understand the systems side of things very well so I apply my profession to a specialty. While I think, and have seen, that applied inversely, people who used to be sysadmins with knowledge of development and development processes.

I think a production engineer is similar loosely in the realm of work that is being done, but ultimately DevOps delivers solutions to and shapes the way the Development team works. Where as a production engineer is likely a systems software engineer who writes software to support infrastructure. They are writing software services which run on infrastructure in support of other services and not like DevOps might write Infrastructure as Code which is usually driving some sort of systems automation(puppet, chef, terraform, etc).

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According to Facebook

Production Engineering at Facebook is a hybrid between software and systems engineering; it keeps Facebook running smoothly and scaling efficiently. The Production Engineering team works within Facebook’s product and infrastructure teams to make sure our services are reliable and scalable. The team writes code and debugs hard problems in live production that impact more than 2 billion people around the world. From backend services like our Hadoop data warehouses, to frontend services like News Feed, to infrastructure components like our caching infrastructure, load balancing and deployment systems, the Production Engineering team keeps Facebook running.

as team works within product and infrastructure meaning it works along with developers and operations.

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  • This only addresses half the question. This doesn't describe what DevOps is and how they compare.
    – tsturzl
    Commented Jul 11, 2018 at 1:00

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