51–60 of 65 posts
Yes, cloud will remove the need for systems administrators/operations much like the power grid has removed the need for electrical engineers.
Actually, they're called "power engineers", and the maturity of the U.S. grid has largely shut down American university production of such engineers.
Back in the late 90's I had a choice. I could go be a programmer or I could go be a sysadmin. I really love programming. I in fact spend my "free time" (as much as a father of an infant and toddler has) programming. However at that time I noticed all the noise about how all the programming jobs were being outsourced.
I made the conclusion then that they could outsource the programmer, but they still need someone to run the infrastructure. I think that will always be the case. I've worked for business focused, rather than technology focused, companies my entire career. OK, 13 years in I've only worked for 2 companies so I can't say I have a ton of exposure, but still... My experience is that the business user wants things done a certain way and a lot of my time is spent engineering solutions to meet those requirements, which often change several times during the project phase. Cloud solutions currently are a pretty well defined box, one that I don't see a lot of business users being comfortable with the restrictions offered.
I do see some things going to cloud. Email for example... please take it. I could get more work done not having to do restores because someone decided to make a POP connection to their mailbox with their phone and deleted all their email on the server. However most of the other solutions I'd see going to the cloud are going to have to go onto basically virtual servers like what Rackspace and Amazon EC2 instances offer. And who's going to know how to manage, configure, and keep those security updates going? Oh yea, the guys who've done it on physical infrastructure for the past few decades. So basically if a company goes that way then I'll have less warranty replacements to worry about.
I think perhaps the cloud is going to change the nature of a sysadmin's job, but the profession isn't going to go away. Heck, I don't even know that I've ever been a pure sysadmin. Seems I've always had to do some programming, engineering and dabble in network the whole time I've been doing this job.
Lastly, I support my company. When there's an emergency, I am available to handle it. I'm not busy managing several other companies disasters as the same time. My business can also dictate my downtime. Oh, you're having a conference in New Zealand during the time we have our normally scheduled email maintenance, well let me just move that window for you so you can get your job done. Don't forget, we're a service based industry and you're going to get a lot better service from someone you pay to be dedicated to you rather than from a company that supports a few thousand customers. You don't have to wait in line for this car wash.
Maybe, 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…
A couple things here... 1. I think there's a distinction between Sys Admin and a more management position like Director of IT or CIO. In some companies there's only one person who fills both roles but they are two distinct roles and I think this article refers to the actual System Administration role rather than the management role that selects software and vendors. 2. While I don't think the System Administrator rol…
That's a lot of words to describe work that isn't a lot of my time annually. Especially on a team where the load is distributed. Take into account that a few hundred "servers" are virtual machines running on tens of physical servers and there you go.
My skill set already requires me to manage multiple operating systems and applications. My biggest value to the company is problem solving, whether it's engineering a solution to meet new business requirements to diagnosing and fixing a problem that can happen anywhere from the hardware to application layer. Sysadmins don't just sit and look at blinky lights all day waiting for one to go orange.
This 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why it's totally impossible. Outsourcing of archive management has been going on for decades at this point.
Depends on your archive. There is literally zero chance a clinical research organization (for example) would outsource any aspect of data collection, storage or retrieval. Regardless of what systems where used there's simply no way you could walk into a boardroom of client pharama execs and say with a straight face you had the level of control over the process required to meet their needs.
1. How to glue disparate systems together.
2. Determine what services to standardize on.
3. Prevent business types from choosing tech sizzle over steak.
4. Translate technology to human readible form.
So long as control and management of information is important to businesses there will be sysadmins.
As with virtually every headline-as-a-question, no . Too much existing infrastructure. Too many systems that aren't web-UI apps with cloud backends. Maybe in ten years, this will be more plausible.
Will existing infrastructure disappear in 10 years?
High quality sysadmins are evolving into what is called the devops role. Trouble shooting, scaling, architecting, and automating production systems are just a few areas where devops people shine. The cloud just provides them another set of tools to work with. It also frees them from dealing with the annoying/repetitive tasks (spinning a CD to install the OS, plugging in the network cables, etc) and allows them to foc…
When Toyota retools a factory, they don't have robots build/deploy the robots, there are engineers that "re-tool". This is exactly what is happening at Google/Facebook/Twitter, etc. There are maintenance guys, aka NOC monkeys, and there are engineers.
Eventually, everyone will need to be an engineer and that is where systems administration is going with the devops movement.
Here is a presentation I gave on it and you tell me if sysadmins are going away. http://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DevOps.pdf