I'll expect to see all system admins gone, when CASE tools actually work and all those programmers disappear. Who ends up employing the system admin is up for debate.
System Admins R.I.P.?
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#12The whole SaaS model just shifts the sysadmins around to where they are more efficiently utilized. They're not disappearing.
But part of being more "efficiently utilized" is improving labor productivity, which all else being equal reduces the demand for sysadmin labor. Although it might make for a more interesting sysadmin job for those that remain.
It's not a zero sum game. There's no point in keeping around jobs are unnecessary.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#13PubNub:
"Cloud-Hosted Service for Real-Time Messaging"
"There is no guarantee that all messages published will be received in the same order that they were sent."
... So not really real-time then. Disappointing, since I was already trying to think of ways to use it.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#14It's interesting to see all these cloud-based services being used in the real world but I hardly think this is the death knell of systems administration as a profession. It would take a pretty major shift in attitudes for medium and large companies to start trusting vendors with the kind of data we're talking about here.
I don't see why it's totally impossible. Outsourcing of archive management has been going on for decades at this point.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#15Maybe, but I don't think so. Not many years ago people got paid to, among other things, pick out the appropriate operating system for any given application. Clearly there's not much of a future in that. These days that same person is responsible for vetting cloud hosting providers, email service providers, and has to be capable of comparing the "old" in-house solutions and bring things inward if there's benefit. The…
I think you are correct - there will always be a need for a (or at least one) sysadmin.
But what cloud services allow us to do these days is scale services without the friction of requisitioning new hardware that used to happen in the past.
Of course, your sysadmin needs to be familiar with tools to help them manage large numbers of servers before this really begins to matter.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#16This reminds me of a sentence I heard somewhere before... Paraphrased: You can make any statements -- so long as you end it with a question mark.
I think it was The Daily Show, when John commented on media headlines.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#17Maybe, but I don't think so. Not many years ago people got paid to, among other things, pick out the appropriate operating system for any given application. Clearly there's not much of a future in that. These days that same person is responsible for vetting cloud hosting providers, email service providers, and has to be capable of comparing the "old" in-house solutions and bring things inward if there's benefit. The…
You are right on - Sys Admins are the glue between business and technology operations. Ok - so gone may be the days when your companies IT department manages colocated servers and/or leased servers - now they will need to evolve and manage a suite of services in the Cloud including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#18Yes, cloud will remove the need for systems administrators/operations much like the power grid has removed the need for electrical engineers.
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#19Hey, instead of paying a person to keep our data on our own systems, we can pay a bunch of companies to keep it on their systems.
They'll never fail, get obsolete, lose our data, get bought out by someone who ruins them, have availability problems, or lock us into using just their service, right? Guys?
Re: System Admins R.I.P.?
#20Maybe it will be end of the BOFH or the eternal deployer (the guy that does not everyday, just deploy software, I saw some of them in my life). Small web companies maybe does not need a sysadmin, since they are focused on one application generally this will not be a major problem for them if they know some best practices.
The majority of sysadmins that I know works in the financial market, telecommunications industry and ISPs, mainly in data centers, helping developers who does not know about the infrastructure or as network operators.