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 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.
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.
Yes and no. System admins aren't disappearing - they're specializing into 2 distinct professions:
* Those working for infrastructure providers (IBM, Amazon, Rackspace) focus on the bottom half of the stack: everything from the datacenter's floor plan to switching and VM allocation.
* Those working for infrastructure consumers (everybody else) focus on the upper half: the business's software stack, how to glue it together, and where to run it.
Conclusion: system admin, as a profession, is gradually disappearing. But it's being replaced by 2 better professions: more challenging work, higher perceived value within the organization, and higher demand.
Shykes comment is better than the article. since about mid 2000s sys admins, regardless of what their job titles are, have become infrastructure engineers. learn the vmware Api, the red hat satellite api, some databases, write some socket apps for monitoring, learn some charting. I'm actually a developer now, but the demands of infrastructure engineering is how I got there.
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 technology changes, but the role more or less stays the same. The system admin is generally a bridge between business operations and the technology stack, and there's always going to be glue there, particularly for businesses of at least 10 people.
Disclosure: System Admin / Engineer by trade. Weigh my opinions appropriately.
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 role will disappear completely I do think the focus will switch from one that is more hardware driven to one that's more software/programming driven. I think businesses will expect System Administrators to handle integrating their cloud based services into a comprehensive whole in the future rather than just making sure there's a network to carry data. That's important because it will mean a dramatic shift in the required skill set.
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.
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.
Anecdote from a SysAdmin: I remember during the early 2000s there was a trend for a little while to scale down the IT department, and rely on corporate support, or use outside consulting firms, or other methods that involved keeping the payroll mostly free of such "backroom" types. I've heard a lot of horror stories from people who would go into a company to fix a small problem or perform an upgrade, and would find virus ridden computers barely running, people doing ridiculous things like burning cds to move a couple of files (remember, early 2000s here), people losing their product license or support information, or other terrible things, simply because there was no on-site sysadmin to keep all of their computers in good functional order.
This article presents much the same scenario, but updated for 2011. And make no mistake, it will probably work for small, well managed, web-based companies, full of people that already know plenty about computers and technology. For pretty much every other type of major company though, there needs to be at least one person who's responsibility is making sure that the technology in the workplace can be worked with and not just worked around, and who can be responsible for dealing with the new technologies that come around, and until the cloud can provide such a service, the sysadmin will be alive and well.
Hey, 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?
Paying a sysadmin is, sadly, not a guarantee that one will have-future proof redundant systems with seven nines of availability that are meticulously documented enough to seemlessly hand over to anybody with a sufficiently wizened countenance.
OK, dueling strawmen out of the way, let me try to add some value to this discussion. Just like the lower rungs of the value chain are getting eaten up in programming, the lower runs of the value chain in sysadminning are also getting eaten away. Back when I was in middle school I was, I kid you not, routinely told that the comparables to my labor at HTML editing all charged $100+ an hour for making websites in Notepad. (Complete with under construction signs.)
Thankfully, the state of the art has improved such that there are a variety of options for e.g. a church school to have a web page listing upcoming Christmas pageants without having to pay $10k a month on an ongoing basis for maintenance.
You know the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs? Well, don't look now, but in a lot of areas they are winning. My old day job called me a Systems Engineer, which includes basic sysadminning, and over my very short career standard deployment practices for e.g. Rails apps have improved radically in a direction which requires me to spend far, far less work at this aspect of m job. There are "real companies" on similar stacks who have server-to-admin ratios which just 10 years would have been unthinkable. (100 to 1? No problem. It's really just 3-to-1 with heavy automation in play, anyhow.)
Sysadmen in the audience worried about their career prospects should probably try pushing themselves up the value chain. There was once lots of value in babysitting cranky programs which blew up frequently in unpredictable ways. That looks like it is changing. Look at Exchange versus I-can't-believe-its-not-Gmail from the perspective of a firm with less than a thousand employees: heads you have someone whose full time job is to fight outages, tails you do not. Don't be the John Henry in that scenario: remember, he dies at the end of the story.
Well it's not always that simple. Sadly technology isn't 1-to-1 and a lot of Enterprise solutions have become stagnant.
To give one example. We've recently started moving our users to Box.Net because the hassle of having a VPN connection for each user just to have them connect to a server with ShadowCopy was becoming too much. Box.Net requires no such VPN connection and its syncing is superior to ShadowCopy bandwidth wise.
Banking and health care data, for example, cannot for the most part live on AWS or some other generic cloud provider. There are financial and legal penalties for leaking a database full of medical histories and Social Security numbers that preclude storing hospital records on slicehost or something. For the time being, and, given the conservative bent of these industries, probably well into the future, there will still be local sysadmins in the classic sense managing physical hardware under physical security.
That said, there's a screaming business opportunity for a group of enterprising sysadmins who want to set up HIPAA-compliant PaaS offerings for medical information shops, or something similar for banks that won't make the SEC or FDIC freak out.
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.
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 focus on improving the application. A number of devops people I know can easily transition into developer roles when required. Summary: a great sysadmin should know how to code and does so in order to improve the app.
Agreed, in manufacturing there are engineers that design the product (currently called developers) and there engineers that design the assembly line (currently called sysadmins).
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.
DevOps! That’s a new terms for me and I love it! I'm a Systems Analyst by title but DevOPS better describes what I actually do. Aside from supporting implementation and configuration I'm also Project managing , QA and coding regularly to resolve the short comings of our system. I’ll be using this term more regularly.
You can have my system admin when you pry him from my cold, dead hands.
Wait, that doesn't sound right.
The points stands, though: I really don't want to do that stuff and he's welcome to it. And I seriously doubt the whole world is going to use someone else's servers... There will always be companies that don't trust 'the cloud'.
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.
Maybe 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.
Sysadmins will not disappear, however, their role will change. The old hardware lugger/patchjockey role is on the way out. However, managing the sensitive data of the organization will be a role forever: data has to be transported, converted, stored, retrieved, archived, etc.
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.
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.
It seems to me that every generation has to learn about IT the hard way. Not just devs but also MBAs. The problems that your IT guy solves are not going away.
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.
So we've progressed from a small subset of the population as sys admins to ... everyone who wants to deploy an application/service being a sys admin? This seems like a step backwards, in some ways.
I suppose this is a win for people that just want email, or documents, or calendars, but for anything else, you're stuck maintaining your own data in the cloud.
[+] [-] cagenut|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shykes|15 years ago|reply
* Those working for infrastructure providers (IBM, Amazon, Rackspace) focus on the bottom half of the stack: everything from the datacenter's floor plan to switching and VM allocation.
* Those working for infrastructure consumers (everybody else) focus on the upper half: the business's software stack, how to glue it together, and where to run it.
Conclusion: system admin, as a profession, is gradually disappearing. But it's being replaced by 2 better professions: more challenging work, higher perceived value within the organization, and higher demand.
[+] [-] nailer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iigs|15 years ago|reply
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 technology changes, but the role more or less stays the same. The system admin is generally a bridge between business operations and the technology stack, and there's always going to be glue there, particularly for businesses of at least 10 people.
Disclosure: System Admin / Engineer by trade. Weigh my opinions appropriately.
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|15 years ago|reply
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 role will disappear completely I do think the focus will switch from one that is more hardware driven to one that's more software/programming driven. I think businesses will expect System Administrators to handle integrating their cloud based services into a comprehensive whole in the future rather than just making sure there's a network to carry data. That's important because it will mean a dramatic shift in the required skill set.
[+] [-] arctangent|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zwilliamson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rnemo|15 years ago|reply
This article presents much the same scenario, but updated for 2011. And make no mistake, it will probably work for small, well managed, web-based companies, full of people that already know plenty about computers and technology. For pretty much every other type of major company though, there needs to be at least one person who's responsibility is making sure that the technology in the workplace can be worked with and not just worked around, and who can be responsible for dealing with the new technologies that come around, and until the cloud can provide such a service, the sysadmin will be alive and well.
[+] [-] zdw|15 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
OK, dueling strawmen out of the way, let me try to add some value to this discussion. Just like the lower rungs of the value chain are getting eaten up in programming, the lower runs of the value chain in sysadminning are also getting eaten away. Back when I was in middle school I was, I kid you not, routinely told that the comparables to my labor at HTML editing all charged $100+ an hour for making websites in Notepad. (Complete with under construction signs.)
Thankfully, the state of the art has improved such that there are a variety of options for e.g. a church school to have a web page listing upcoming Christmas pageants without having to pay $10k a month on an ongoing basis for maintenance.
You know the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs? Well, don't look now, but in a lot of areas they are winning. My old day job called me a Systems Engineer, which includes basic sysadminning, and over my very short career standard deployment practices for e.g. Rails apps have improved radically in a direction which requires me to spend far, far less work at this aspect of m job. There are "real companies" on similar stacks who have server-to-admin ratios which just 10 years would have been unthinkable. (100 to 1? No problem. It's really just 3-to-1 with heavy automation in play, anyhow.)
Sysadmen in the audience worried about their career prospects should probably try pushing themselves up the value chain. There was once lots of value in babysitting cranky programs which blew up frequently in unpredictable ways. That looks like it is changing. Look at Exchange versus I-can't-believe-its-not-Gmail from the perspective of a firm with less than a thousand employees: heads you have someone whose full time job is to fight outages, tails you do not. Don't be the John Henry in that scenario: remember, he dies at the end of the story.
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|15 years ago|reply
To give one example. We've recently started moving our users to Box.Net because the hassle of having a VPN connection for each user just to have them connect to a server with ShadowCopy was becoming too much. Box.Net requires no such VPN connection and its syncing is superior to ShadowCopy bandwidth wise.
[+] [-] jcdreads|15 years ago|reply
That said, there's a screaming business opportunity for a group of enterprising sysadmins who want to set up HIPAA-compliant PaaS offerings for medical information shops, or something similar for banks that won't make the SEC or FDIC freak out.
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ramonRecuero|15 years ago|reply
But who knows what will happen in the future...
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatherlinux|15 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] wundie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neworbit|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strlen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroclydon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
Wait, that doesn't sound right.
The points stands, though: I really don't want to do that stuff and he's welcome to it. And I seriously doubt the whole world is going to use someone else's servers... There will always be companies that don't trust 'the cloud'.
[+] [-] syaz1|15 years ago|reply
I think it was The Daily Show, when John commented on media headlines.
[+] [-] qntm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krobertson|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zppx|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] heresy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueben|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quarck|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] knieveltech|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] revoltingx|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] johngalt|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tjarratt|15 years ago|reply
I suppose this is a win for people that just want email, or documents, or calendars, but for anything else, you're stuck maintaining your own data in the cloud.