Death of the Sysadmin? Rumors Greatly Exaggerated
Bernard Golden wrote a fascinating post on ITworld that absolutely nails the challenge facing enterprise IT today: Crushing complexity.
Hyperbolic as it may be, his title says a lot: “Cloud and the Death of the Sysadmin.”
His point? Today’s sysadmin—”the Swiss Army Knife of IT”—cannot weather the storm of complexity converging upon them. Virtualization and cloud promise to compound system volume—and the complexity of these systems grows in conjunction with the specialization of roles, software and the accelerating rate of change.
He uses the example of modern manufacturing, which is automated by necessity. Why? Because the complexity of manufactured products outstripped the capacity of unaided human labor. That is exactly why IT systems must be automated—and not automated with clever scripts and other ad hoc methods to “make stuff work.” It must be automated in the truest manufacturing sense—they must be engineered. (see my post from yesterday; Forrester makes this same point loud and clear). Policies must drive how systems are built. Models must define their deployed state. Version control must keep them controlled and consistent across their lifecycle.
The reality is that there’s too much complexity and change for a sysadmin to hold all of this in their head—or in a spreadsheet or notebook, for that matter.
Rumors of the demise of the sysadmin may be greatly exaggerated. But the role must transform.
According to Golden: “Tomorrow’s sysadmin won’t be someone who knows enough about a bunch of different things and can write glue scripts. He or she will be a systems engineer, akin to a physician-someone doing assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of highly sophisticated software agglomerations.”
But this evolution cannot occur without an equal evolution in the system management tools they’re provided.
Comments
Leave a Reply
