System Admins R.I.P.?

Especially in organisations which handle data of a sensitive nature the sys-admin (or whatever his/her role will be called) will have an important role in the organisation (think especially of organisations which have to conform to HIPAA, PCI, or other data protection regulations).

The success of an organization will in these Internet times be determined by the value of the (customer) data it holds and the ability to extract business value from that data. A data admin is therefore an essential task in any organisation. The future role of Sysadmins will therefore move in that direction in my opionion.

Disclaimer: the writer is an IT Architect at a large DataCenter Services Provider.

In the same way, the demands shifts from one sort of systems administrator -- the traditional sys admin who racks and stacks machine and manually edits config files on a UNIX system, to another: one who approaches the problem from a computer science and engineering point of view (using software such as chef/puppet, developing custom tooling, working closely with application developers, etc...).

All of this is not news to me: I've been doing this kind of work in 2006 at Yahoo before it had a buzz word ("devops") attached to it (these days I've shifted to being "pure" software developer). Broadly speaking, we had three kinds of operations personnel: those working at the physical layer, the network layer and those working between the operating system and the application layer.

Majority of the upper layer work was either writing code or working very closely with application developers. Thanks to these tools we could deploy and re-deploy machines within the matter of minutes (with no virtualization involved) and handle servers arriving by the truckloads.

I'm glad that Amazon and others have made the lower layers a publicly available service, so that the people preferring to work at the upper layers _but would prefer to be in a startup_ (rather than a corporate behemoth) could concentrate on the work they find fulfilling.

On the one hand they're insulting. The author is clearly wholesale ignorant of the vast majority of sysadmin roles and responsibilities (and why companies need them) and yet feels like they know what they're talking about enough to declare the role dead.

On the other hand, developers with no clue whats entailed in sysadminning are the number one source of our job security, so its a backhandedly good thing.

Please, by all means host your startup's database in a "aaS" solution with ~500 IOPS (except sometimes! at random!) across a 50 - 100ms link. It will make me look like a wizard when I clean up your rookie moves.