[nycbug-talk] Hypothetical: the end of the sysadmin/systems engineer/DBA?

[Marc Spitzer]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>> Shared this with my colleague at work. Very interesting and as the
>> previous posted said, "spot-on".
>> Thanks,
>
> Can you share how the articles are "spot-on" if they both contradict each
> other?
>

this is a little late but what the hell

Both articles point to the death of the mid-level/journeymen sysadmin.
 This is because they both predict that much of the "wrench turning"
work will be diapering from day to day operations, punching down
serial terminal lines in the wiring closet for example or defraging
disks to name another.  most of the mid-level  work is a good place to
automate as most simple things are pretty much worked out, a lot of
this is due to economies of scale coming in with cloud computing or
mid-range servers that can hold a small data center from 5 years ago
on one box with Jails driving it.  For example TripWire has a little
yellow book they sell/give away,
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Ops-Handbook-Implementing-Practical/dp/0975568612/,
has some interesting information about how places with high server to
SA ratios generally do not trouble shoot boxes they just reinstall
them, if that does not work then there is something wrong with the
build process and you fix the build process.  Now doing this right is
a high skill task, trouble shooting a box has become a low skill task
and the middle get squeezed a bit smaller.

marc

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