I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as each new buzzword layer enters the scene (SaaS, IaaS, MS, VZ, cloud, containers, ...). Each time one of these technologies comes along I look at it and say "boy, is that stupid / inefficient / costly". Of course, I'm thinking as a sysadmin.
A couple of years ago it dawned on me that the whole point of these techs was to eliminate sysadmins. These techs *are* inefficient in that they all take more CPU cycles / RAM / storage; they are more costly in that they aren't as cheap as I can do it myself (i.e. cloud vs dedicated server). But that's me, computer expert, who can do everything myself (from hw to os to sw) very quickly. Not CEO who doesn't even know what an OS is.
I mean, look at docker or flatpacks or even VMs. These things are the opposite of what we spent 30 years working against... duplication. So now we have the same/similar 100-thousand OS files duplicated everywhere. Now they want to undo the entire concept of shared libraries and essentially make libs static again (well, shared but distribute specific lib versions with the apps, duplicating out the wazoo). For an efficiency purist it seems insane.
So what gives? *** It's to eliminate/reduce one of the most highly paid workers in IT: sysadmins. Or at least, to (finally) allow the overseas outsourcing of sysadmin duties. As MUUGers, a lot of us are sysadmins. We should care. Personally, I'm not worried (as I'm sure many of you aren't), as our skillsets are so diversified, we can't be pigeonholed, and, as required, we can be the masters of any new technology.
My only question is one of curiosity, will they succeed in murdering most sysadmins? Will they save their $100kUS$/yr/sysadmin by giving it all to AWS? Will people accept the obvious inefficiencies of flatpacks in order to delete the cost of people? Actually, I'm dubious, as I've read these buzzwords in trade pubs ever since I started in tech ~1997, every single one claiming to be the admin-killing panacea, and they came and went, and most turned out to be waaay overblown. I'll be shocked if they actually succeed in killing sysadmins this time.
Anyone else thinking about these things?
Bonus question: What happens the day AWS (or whatever) screws up / has a major data loss / some other calamity? You sure are putting a lot of trust in *their* sysadmins, who may not be as smart as you are!
Decent new article about it all this here: https://www.informationweek.com/devops/rip-systems-administrator-welcome-dev...