On Aug 11, 2014, at 1:42 PM, Brandon Allbery <[email protected]> wrote: > Ask Google or Amazon SREs how far that goes.
Well, he doesn't need to, if he just farms out all his workload to AWS instances. I think that's the key differentiator, actually. There is a subset of people who think "The Cloud is EVERYTHING". These are mostly young upstarts or whipper-snappersa[1]. There is a subset of people who realize "The Cloud is useful, but there's a time and a place where you should be operating on real metal." These are mostly the greybeards.[1] If you want to spend your entire career just grabbing cattle, using them, and then slaughtering them when you're done, you don't need of lot of what we greybeards think of as "important". You'll have built out an automation framework to take advantage of that paradigm and - for the most part - you're going to do pretty well with that. But if you realize you're in a market-segment where you need puppies, or where the amount of meat the API lets you butcher from the cattle isn't enough, and you want every last scrap of tissue, or if you decide you want to be in the business of raising cattle... then the things the greybeards have learned over the intervening decades are every bit as important today as they were then (in fact, more so, because of the scale of failure for ignoring them). [2] There are going to be two "classes" of admins as the industry moves forward. 1.) There is going to end up being a category of "sysadmin" work that is - for all intents and purposes - at the level of "IT Helpdesk" work today, the routine provisioning of resources, ordering additional toner^Wcapacity, making sure the new office^WAWS-Cluster has connectivity to the rest of the corporate network, etc. 2.) There is going to be a category that is largely unchanged from "traditional" system administration today. #1 will *far* outnumber #2, in the same way that there are more "office IT guys" than there are "system administrators" today, because a lot of existing companies' needs can be met by the cloud. But where the real... action is? That's going to be #2, all the way, breaking new ground and tinkering with the technologies that eventually get rolled into the services that the #1s of the world partake of. My $0.02 worth on this topic anyway. Cheers, D [1] Sarcasm, in case it's not intuitively obvious. [2] I don't like that this metaphor implies you're going to butcher the puppies instead. But let's not quibble over who eats what.
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