[Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators

Fri Jan 16 18:14:21 PST 2015

On 1/16/15 5:24 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote:
> So in the interest in having more interesting conversations on this 
> list ...
>
> BayLISA is the Bay Area Large Installation System Administrators 
> group.  Traditionally, its memberships has been System Administrators, 
> defined as both a self-identification and a job title.
>
> It appears to me that more and more advanced companies out there are 
> moving away from the System Administrator job title and, in some 
> cases, the System Administrator role (Netflix, for example, has no 
> System Administrators in the production path for streaming).
>
> What happens to sysadmins?
>
> -roy
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> Baylisa at baylisa.org
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Good topic!

So, first off.  A lot of the low level sysadmins (kernel hackers, 
rack-and-stackers, killer network folks, etc.) will go to huge 
installations like Rackspace and Joyent and AWS.  They will do awesome 
things there.

The Systems folks who do software installation and configuration/tuning 
will pick up chef/puppet/ansible/$CONFIG_MGMT_OF_THE_WEEK, and 
everything will be represented as code changes.

The all around, jack of all trades folks...  There's a lot here, but 
will be mostly writing automation code of one form or another 
(Provisioning, install, config, deployment, continuous 
integration/deployment, etc.).  They will be working on the 
Infrastructure as code movement and moving further and further up the 
stack.  The term DevOps has been given to this role, but DevOps isn't 
supposed to be a role, it's supposed to be a culture.

~Sean