There's no exist, there is only power.
That said, sysadmins will never become obsolete in your lifetime.
Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#62You transition to being a "Cloud Engineer", which is basically the same, but in the cloud. You'll be running bash scripts through a terminal emulator in your browser , and define settings for managed vm's using yaml. There's a brand new cloud world out there and it looks pretty much the same. I think the next hot thing after devops and datascientists are gonna be cloud architects and engineers.
God no. Don’t tell him this. There are already too many sysadmins that take the on prem, non automated, lift and shift mentality to the cloud, and leave in their wake an infrastructure that costs more than if they had just used bare metal at s colo.
If you’re hosting a bunch of VMs “in the cloud” and doing the same stuff you did on prem you’ve just gotten the worse of both worlds - you’re spending more and not getting any of the benefits of letting your cloud vendor do any of the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”.
My experience with “cloud architects” who don’t know anything about development is that they are actually a liability.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#63What do you mean? Doesn't matter if it's on premise or in the cloud(someone elses computer) - someone still has to manage it from the company's point. If you leave it to the devs it'll be a disaster. With that said, this industry is moving fast and if you wanna keep up you need to learn bash/python or powershell on windows, eventually... this is true. Or you can move to smaller companies with fewer assets to manage.…
I disagree, if you leave it to the sysadmins that take their same mentality to the cloud, it’s a bigger disaster.
I straddle both sides and I’d much rather deal with a seasoned software architect who comes to the cloud from that side than a sysadmin who comes from the other side.
A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage. A good software Architect is mich more likely to be push as much off on to manage services as possible and automate as much as possible.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#64What do you mean? Doesn't matter if it's on premise or in the cloud(someone elses computer) - someone still has to manage it from the company's point. If you leave it to the devs it'll be a disaster. With that said, this industry is moving fast and if you wanna keep up you need to learn bash/python or powershell on windows, eventually... this is true. Or you can move to smaller companies with fewer assets to manage.…
I disagree, if you leave it to the sysadmins that take their same mentality to the cloud, it’s a bigger disaster. I straddle both sides and I’d much rather deal with a seasoned software architect who comes to the cloud from that side than a sysadmin who comes from the other side. A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage. A good software Architect is mich more…
"A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage"
There may be some people like that, but I never said that I didn't want to automate my job. I'd rather automate as much as possible. I realize that in order to scale infrastructure, you can't be sitting around manually pressing buttons and running apt-get command to install software.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#65You transition to being a "Cloud Engineer", which is basically the same, but in the cloud. You'll be running bash scripts through a terminal emulator in your browser , and define settings for managed vm's using yaml. There's a brand new cloud world out there and it looks pretty much the same. I think the next hot thing after devops and datascientists are gonna be cloud architects and engineers.
God no. Don’t tell him this. There are already too many sysadmins that take the on prem, non automated, lift and shift mentality to the cloud, and leave in their wake an infrastructure that costs more than if they had just used bare metal at s colo. If you’re hosting a bunch of VMs “in the cloud” and doing the same stuff you did on prem you’ve just gotten the worse of both worlds - you’re spending more and not gettin…
I'm aware of the "lift and shift" mentality that some people have. I know several people who work at another company that decided to just uplift their on-prem VM-based software stack into AWS. It went very poorly.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, if you leave it to the sysadmins that take their same mentality to the cloud, it’s a bigger disaster. I straddle both sides and I’d much rather deal with a seasoned software architect who comes to the cloud from that side than a sysadmin who comes from the other side. A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage. A good software Architect is mich more…
"A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage" There may be some people like that, but I never said that I didn't want to automate my job. I'd rather automate as much as possible. I realize that in order to scale infrastructure, you can't be sitting around manually pressing buttons and running apt-get command to install software.
And that requires programming.
When the software architects come to you with a plan about how they plan to implement something, are you going you to understand the technology well enough to know that there is a managed alternative or will you just set up another VM?
I was a dev lead at my previous company and they decided to “move to the cloud”. They brought in a whole bunch of consultants. I didn’t know the first thing about AWS back then. I showed the consultants my architectural plans. All of this was greenfield development. If they had known anything about development and understood anything I was talking about, there is no way they wouldn’t have suggested that we used managed services in place of things I was proposing hosting in VMs.
Are you also willing to give up hosting things on VMs entirely and using managed services when possible. Will you even know how AWS’s services can be used in place of self hosted applications?
This isn’t aimed at you in particular. But there is a lot more to implementing systems on AWS cost efficiently than automating VMs.
Too many sysadmins turned “Cloud Architects” can’t get their mind around being “cloud native”.
I haven’t even mentioned Kubernetes or Docker - because I haven’t used either yet.
The consultants manually set up a VPC with different subnets in different availability zones just like they would have done on prem. No CloudFormation, no separate accounts under an organization, etc.
They couldn’t talk about using AWS as developers, or setting up a CI/CD pipeline using AWS’s services.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#67Okay, first off, being a sysadmin or an ops person is important! You are the first line of defense, and many times, companies just need eyes on systems (all the time). It's your ability to analyze a problem that makes you useful. There are ALWAYS boring repetitive service tasks that aren't rewarded but someone needs to do (this is true for devs too). Most of this probably doesn't seem hard or new to you, but I just w…
Thanks for the response. As far as debugging other people's work, I do that a fair bit within our configuration management system. I also write "fresh" config management states (we use SaltStack), fairly often as well. But SaltStack is mostly human-readable YAML/Jinja, so it doesn't seem to cause the same issues as trying to write and parse Python.
Did you try to learn python following a good course that people recommend? I always find it leaps and bounds smoother and easier to learn from a structured course.
Try Udacity or Coursera.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#68Email (address in profile) me if you want to do some pair programming sessions. I've helped others get unstuck this way.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#69What do you mean? Doesn't matter if it's on premise or in the cloud(someone elses computer) - someone still has to manage it from the company's point. If you leave it to the devs it'll be a disaster. With that said, this industry is moving fast and if you wanna keep up you need to learn bash/python or powershell on windows, eventually... this is true. Or you can move to smaller companies with fewer assets to manage.…
I disagree, if you leave it to the sysadmins that take their same mentality to the cloud, it’s a bigger disaster. I straddle both sides and I’d much rather deal with a seasoned software architect who comes to the cloud from that side than a sysadmin who comes from the other side. A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage. A good software Architect is mich more…
Sysadmin doesn't wanna automate his job? Where did that come from? I am trying to automate as much as possible, because doing repetitive tasks is boring, I'll much rather read HN instead :)
But I see your point, the problem with cloud services is that they don't share the same features so if you know AWS and then you move to azure you have to re-learn not just the naming but also how to work with a new toolset which is annoying, so most sysadmins will automate, but just not at the cloud provider level but below. I think this isn't wrong though because setting up an environment can be a lot more painful if you need to switch providers for whatever reason.
But I haven't worked in a large company, only below 200 employees so my thinking might be a little different.
Re: Ask HN: Why do I exist as a sysadmin?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, if you leave it to the sysadmins that take their same mentality to the cloud, it’s a bigger disaster. I straddle both sides and I’d much rather deal with a seasoned software architect who comes to the cloud from that side than a sysadmin who comes from the other side. A sysadmin doesn’t want to automate his job and let the cloud provider manage what they can manage. A good software Architect is mich more…
Sysadmin doesn't wanna automate his job? Where did that come from? I am trying to automate as much as possible, because doing repetitive tasks is boring, I'll much rather read HN instead :) But I see your point, the problem with cloud services is that they don't share the same features so if you know AWS and then you move to azure you have to re-learn not just the naming but also how to work with a new toolset which…
Fair enough.
I guess the larger issue is how much is the entire organization willing to rethink their architecture - hopefully led by the cloud experts - to be cloud native? If you are just hosting a bunch of VMs and not taking advantage of the providers manager services, from my experience, it will always cost more than just staying on prem.