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System Admins R.I.P.?

blogs.mulesoft.org

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Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

cagenut wrote: post #36

As a sysadmin these kinds of articles have a sort of duality to them. 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 so…

I spent two days trying to figure out how to compile a 32 bit library on a 64 bit system.

A sysadmin would have figured it out in 5 minutes, and lazily dropped by my desk to show me where I went wrong.

In my experience, sysadmins aren't just people who keep things running during the course of Business As Usual, you guys are also a terrifying repository of arcane knowledge.

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#43

Post by knieveltech »

jacques_chester wrote: post #14
knieveltech wrote: post #5

It'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.

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.

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#44

Post by krobertson »

All of those systems introduce convenience at the cost of lockin and they are no longer suitable once you reach a certain scale. Then the problem becomes either the lack of visibility or the cost with the metered services.

For me, a nice service like PubNub would run us nearly $300/day. Compare that to a simple EC2 m1.large at $240/month.

Visibility comes most of all with DBs where you want to manage lower level settings. Things like MySQL configs, disk volumes and their configuration, etc. Good luck tracking your IOPS on a hosted service, or since they're likely cloud based, getting good throughput/latency levels.

Overall though, sysadmins are changing into devops. They're the ones who connect the dots between what the app is doing, what scale it needs to run at, and the systems need to support those. As things grow, need management of all the moving pieces. Then comes monitoring minute aspects of the environment to ensure performance and stability, paging when something goes out of bounds, etc. And as you grow, minor changes or upgrades can have a huge impact or require a lot of roll out, so need to test and benchmark several aspects.

Sysadmins in the small scale may be less important, but they're becoming even more critical as you grow. The nice part is the tools they can leverage are growing so you can do more with fewer hands.

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#45

Post by danenania »

knieveltech wrote: post #43
jacques_chester wrote: post #14

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.

"literally zero chance"? Come on now...

I've only worked on ~10 paid development gigs and one of the first ones was a pharma research company who hired my team to create an interface for a truckload of sensitive data after nothing more than a phone call and a quick NDA. This pattern has continued in a few subsequent projects, often with no NDA or contract whatsoever.

A great many companies stop caring about privacy the second they can make or save a few bucks, questionable legality or ethics notwithstanding one bit. Businesses in general are fortunate that MOST software engineers seem to be honest and good people, because they regularly hand over the keys to the castle, often without even realizing it or considering the potential implications at all, and to be honest I'm actually quite glad it works this way. For whatever reason, we as a profession have apparently been deemed highly trustworthy, and I much prefer this situation with all its risks to a world of bulletproof firewalls and bureaucratic red tape.

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#46

Post by njharman »

neworbit wrote: post #35
chadr wrote: post #31

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…

That still feels like "sysadmins are being replaced by developers" to me

Only developers think sysadmins arent developers.

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#47

Post by ramonRecuero »

Semiapies wrote: post #8

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.

Yes, I think you are right. There are a lot of desktops apps. But even if they were not, right now, the PaaS options like AppEngine or the new AWS Elastic Beanstalk are too restrictive and not mature enough to become a serious alternative for enterprise apps.

But who knows what will happen in the future...

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#48

Post by knieveltech »

danenania wrote: post #45
knieveltech wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"literally zero chance"? Come on now... I've only worked on ~10 paid development gigs and one of the first ones was a pharma research company who hired my team to create an interface for a truckload of sensitive data after nothing more than a phone call and a quick NDA. This pattern has continued in a few subsequent projects, often with no NDA or contract whatsoever. A great many companies stop caring about privacy t…

I'm serious. Between government data retention regulations and hyper-paranoid client pharmaco company execs the odds of a CRO putting their data out on the cloud are functionally nil. This may change one day but that's the reality today. We're talking the kinds of shops that are still signing million dollar deals with IBM reps to provide in-house server infrastructure.

There's a world of difference between hiring contractors to come in and develop in-house systems and betting the farm on a 3rd party vendor.

Re: System Admins R.I.P.?

#49

Post by knieveltech »

njharman wrote: post #46
neworbit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still feels like "sysadmins are being replaced by developers" to me

Only developers think sysadmins arent developers.

Conversely only sysadmins think sysadmins can code. A classic example is a close personal friend of mine who works as an sysadmin for an insurance company.

On two occasions I've had the unfortunate displeasure of working with him on web-related projects (we share similar hobbies and our local communities need web services of various kinds) his approach has been vile, Rube Goldbergesque concretions of Perl & shell scripts.

This is absolutely THE GUY I'd call if I needed some advanced logfile parsing in a hurry, but when it comes to actually developing web stuff the guy's totally in the dark. What's worse is his only metric is "It works and it makes sense to me" so he's content to make a complete hash of a development project.

During a recent conversation he admitted to having no real grasp on basic HTML and hadn't heard of CSS. The thing that kills me is he's convinced he's qualified to run websites for our local groups and absolutely refuses to accept input on the subject.

Oh well, the guy's also an ace whitewater kayaker and one of my favorite paddling buddies. Considering this guy will probably save me from drowning one day I can look past his failings as a "developer".

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