[Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators

Tue Jan 20 12:42:40 PST 2015

I administrated a Raspberry Pi into submission a few weeks ago, spent an
hour or so. It's going to copy the current weather from my weather station
to weather underground until it gets a hardware failure and need to be
replaced, hopefully it will last a few years. Is that what you meant?

Adrian

On Sunday, January 18, 2015, Rob Markovic <rob.markovic at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:;>> 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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