Azure DevOps (the product) vs. DevOps on Azure (the role)
Azure DevOps is a Microsoft product — boards for tickets, code repositories and build pipelines (formerly TFS and VSTS). DevOps is a role and a way of working. So a developer who tracked tickets in Azure Boards can honestly write 'Azure DevOps' on their resume without having done any DevOps engineering. A keyword search for 'Azure DevOps' catches both.
How to tell them apart on a resume
Azure DevOps (the tool)
Azure Boards, Azure Repos, work items, sprints, TFS, VSTS — listed by developers, testers and project managers as the tool their team used.
DevOps engineer on Azure
YAML pipelines they wrote, AKS, Terraform or Bicep, ARM templates, release automation, monitoring, on-call — building and running the infrastructure.
The question that settles it
“Did you use Azure DevOps to track work and run pipelines someone else set up, or did you build and maintain the pipelines and infrastructure yourself?”
Read the full definitions
Open the full tool for the other look-alike pairs, role profiles, and the JD decoder.