[Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators

Sat Jan 17 10:36:54 PST 2015

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:14 PM, Sean Hart <boardnutz at blacklight.net> wrote:
> On 1/16/15 5:24 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote:
>> 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?

I had a similar conversation with a DBA recently, someone who'd spent
his entire career tuning, admining, monitoring, and migrating oracle
instances; he started looking at some of the cloud-based database
services and realized it wasn't something he was prepared for, that
there was an entire team of people abstractly re-tuning and managing
the data service without engineer interaction or guidance (and doing
it correctly, and without downtime). The conversation moved from a
"this was neat" perspective to a realization of, "man, I'm obsolete
soon, now what?"

I don't see many (any?) public offerings that can successfully
supplant a full time SA or DevOps team, but I'm sure it's only a
matter of time. I know I'm trying to stay marginally fresh with new
and existing language skills, but what are others doing to stay
viable?

-- 
- Jon Gilbert
jong at jong.org / jgilbertsjc at gmail.com