[Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators

Sun Jan 18 17:41:45 PST 2015

With the coming wave of IoT, unfortunately, Sys Admin or not, we will all
become AoT, Adminitrators of Things.

Some of us already are, with who knows how many different devices at home.

Not going away until things administer themselves.

-- Rob

about.me/vRobM
  [image: Rob Marković on about.me]
    <http://about.me/vRobM>

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Roy Rapoport <rsr at inorganic.org> wrote:

> On 1/16/15 6:14 PM, Sean Hart wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Putting aside the description of rack-and-stackers as doing "awesome
> things," I don't think it's actually accurate to say "a lot of the low
> level" folks will end up going to Joyent, Rackspace, etc, because with the
> increasing concentration of physical hardware in the hands of relatively
> few players, the number of jobs dealing with hardware doesn't increase --
> it decreases for exactly the same sizing efficiencies that we as customers
> then end up taking advantage of.
>
>  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.
>>
>
> Some, certainly.  I brought Puppet into Netflix (and some other people
> later brought Chef in); but it still wasn't enough to save IT from being
> considered obsolete to production management, partially because we had so
> many IT people mired in an old and systems-specific way of thinking about
> what we built, and what the definition of "success" was.  And that old way
> is basically bankrupt -- IT has traditionally done a terrible job serving
> its customers, I'd argue (though a fair case could be made that IT's
> typically put in an almost impossible position where it's very unlikely to
> do anything but a terrible job -- one of the reasons I'd likely retire from
> the workforce rather than ever go into IT again).
>
>  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.
>>
>
> We've been hearing about "moving up the stack" in various contexts;
> remember when we heard about this in the context of the offshoring movement
> and what we as engineers needed to do to stay relevant and employable? We
> were all going to become architects, and product managers, and ... a whole
> bunch of other positions of which there weren't enough for everyone :)
>
>
> -roy
>
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