System Admins R.I.P.?

As a sysadmin these kinds of articles have a sort of duality to them.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Yes and no. System admins aren't disappearing - they're specializing into 2 distinct professions:<p>* Those working for infrastructure <i>providers</i> (IBM, Amazon, Rackspace) focus on the bottom half of the stack: everything from the datacenter's floor plan to switching and VM allocation.<p>* Those working for infrastructure <i>consumers</i> (everybody else) focus on the upper half: the business's software stack, how to glue it together, and where to run it.<p>Conclusion: system admin, as a profession, is gradually disappearing. But it's being replaced by 2 <i>better</i> professions: more challenging work, higher perceived value within the organization, and higher demand.

Maybe, but I don't think so.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Disclosure: System Admin / Engineer by trade. Weigh my opinions appropriately.

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.<p>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.<p>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?

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.<p>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.

As with virtually every headline-as-a-question, <i>no</i>.<p>Too much existing infrastructure. Too many systems that aren't web-UI apps with cloud backends.<p>Maybe in ten years, this will be more plausible.

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.

Yes, cloud will remove the need for systems administrators/operations much like the power grid has removed the need for electrical engineers.

You can have my system admin when you pry him from my cold, dead hands.<p>Wait, that doesn't sound right.<p>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'.

This reminds me of a sentence I heard somewhere before... Paraphrased: You can make <i>any</i> statements -- so long as you end it with a question mark.<p>I think it was The Daily Show, when John commented on media headlines.

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

" Compared to system administration, being cursed forever is a step up." -- Paul Tomko.

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.<p>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.

Probably best career decision I ever made, was in 1999, 1 year into my career, to switch from system administration to programming as my focus.

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.<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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

PubNub:<p>"Cloud-Hosted Service for Real-Time Messaging"<p>"There is no guarantee that all messages published will be received in the same order that they were sent."<p>... So not really real-time then. Disappointing, since I was already trying to think of ways to use it.

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.<p>1. How to glue disparate systems together.<p>2. Determine what services to standardize on.<p>3. Prevent business types from choosing tech sizzle over steak.<p>4. Translate technology to human readible form.<p>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.<p>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.

From a couple of years ago: We're all ops people now <a href="http://osspack.com/open-source/edd-dumbill-were-all-ops-people-now/" rel="nofollow">http://osspack.com/open-source/edd-dumbill-were-all-ops-peop...</a>

Sysadmins are being replaced, but guess by who? The fancier term "System Integrator". Now the sysadmins design 'solutions' for businesses. Case in point: Look at all the telecom solutions being deployed.

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.

Was it just me who thought that this headline meant that some 'sysadmin' had written yet another tool to automate stuff? ;-)

This article couldn't be more wrong-headed.

Are businesses going to start putting all their proprietary information in the cloud? If so, I could see a short term where getting a job might be difficult, until enough companies get burned and realized they should have never let their information off their network.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

The whole SaaS model just shifts the sysadmins around to where they are more efficiently utilized. They're not disappearing.