The future of IT is – to deliver automation. Discuss You don't have to be a large enterprise to benefit from technology, though access to seemingly endless resources tends to help. I've worked in SMB IT my whole life and automation changes everything at this level. So many things that reasonably should be automated simply aren't in the SMB world. We rely on fallible humans. …
Seriously though, when I was doing work experience, I met a guy who spent half of every working day taking numbers from a dozen spreadsheets from different engineering departments and manually entering them into one master spreadsheet. He had been manually repeating exactly the same process for years.
It sounds like Sysadmins are going to be extinct in a matter of months.
With everythnig migrating to 'The Cloud' then in-house/on-site admins won't be needed.
What about the SME segment? Can they afford this move?
Then who sets up the systems in the first place? Some will'o'the wisp character that only comes out when a full moon falls on a Sunday?
Still, interesteing times ahead.
That reminds me, Ian Anderson is doing some gigs around the country telling the story of Jethro Tull. (not the band but the original JT).
Perhaps all Sysadmins should make the effort to go along and see their future?
Part of the problem here is thinking of Sally as a person. She isn't, she's a temperamental and inefficient peripheral - much like those old so-called "high speed" paper tape readers which spent most of their time sulking and turning your FORTRAN source code into makrame. Whereas there's clearly plenty of scope for increasing the efficiency of IT operations, the real gain comes from automating Sally, and her fleshy colleagues, out of existence, There's a while yet before they come for you, but your turn will, of course, come eventually, though if you're clever, you'll automate your bosses before they automate you.
More to the point, what will THEY do?
"Being super rich" does not mean all that much except that you can amuse yourself with starting interesting industrial projects if you are so enclined. It definitely does NOT mean being able to block economic activity of the downtrodden proletarians, at least not in a society based on a free market.
Yes, Marx' horror vision could only come about in Marxism or other forms of oligarchic control. Weird, ain't it?
Completely Off-Topic [crossing fingers] that was on one of the Marxists' main points whenever I'd run into the remaining Marxian true believers. Russia and China were exactly the wrong places for Marxism to take holdmlacking a proletariat to begin with. (It's kind of hard to express a class interest when a class doesn't exist.) Now an industrial/services based economy in an information age transition bringing online nanotechnology, bioengineering, and smart/AI? Where do the other 97% fit in? (2% to do things machines humming. ) Random thought. Fermi paradox?
Fortunately I ain't gonna be around for that drama. Surprising I made it this far.
When the super-rich and corporations own all the A.I. and robots (already), and replace almost all jobs (more and more), what will you do?
Well, I'll probably be dead by then and so will you.
Any grandchildren I'm fortunate enough to have will make their own decisions as no matter how well I try to plan my families transition into that brave new world, anything I think of today will be obsolete before then.
If you're really worried about it, buy some land and some Google shares. I don't own Google shares, but I figure if they can't crack AI themselves then they'll probably buy out whomever does. Any gravitation of wealth as you describe should then accrue in part to you, solving the problem as you experience it.
the end of Windows?
I jest of course, but for automation to work you need to be able to access the data and GUIs are generally quite bad at that. You end up going from a little script to automate a small process to a huge project which fails. Automation is often about transforming data and that's where *nix excels. That perl script is going to chomp through the process much faster than your excel spreadsheet. Batch extract, process and batch import. 120,000 records? Easy and no running out of memory either.
I remember processing firewall changes. They would arrive in Word documents with random table elements. Even a manual cut&paste into vim, save as text and then running them through a script saved heaps of time.
Of course MS does very well is a massive army of VB/Word macro and template programmers. My own experience of that is that it is a living hell of fragility. Drive mappings going here there and everywhere. Everyone on a slightly different version, or at least different data cached who-knows-where.
Herein lies the key as I see it: use computers to process data and keep the UI minimal. It's often the UI which is difficult, not the data processing. Chain processes together to keep each step simple. Often a cron job every few minutes is easier to do than a true on-demand system. Make sure you check for sane results before committing data.
It depends; I've been playing around with PowerShell recently and I found it lacking from time to time. For something relatively easy; changing ownership of directories (cacls for the win), I needed a third party module to enable performing such an action. The actual setting worked, but in a real environment you're not just allowed to run unknown 3rd party code.
It's quite powerful and way better than what you could do with VBScript, but it has taken quite a lot of time. In earlier versions of Windows (before 8.1/2012R2) it was still lacking easy access to a lot of functionality. to be honest; I became a PowerShell fan, because it worked wonders in the vSphere environment (PowerCLI), from there I looked at what you could do with it in Windows itself.
Having spent time with Cisco's UCS Director in recent months Automation done right is a massive benefit. I still don't think it'll reduce the requirement for techs. We recently setup a system where when the customer wanted to increase their VMware Cluster they simply added a blade into UCS clicked a few buttons in a web interface and the system setup the blades hardware, installed ESXi, added it to the cluster, assigned the host profile and initiated DRS to balance the load onto the new host. Took the tech 5 minutes tops and the rest was done for him.
Most businesses I see tend to constantly be firefighting. Trying to balance system management and projects at the same time. Automation removes some of mundane tasks (building windows, patching etc) and allows them more time on the more interesting stuff.
Its not the same for all companies I see but this is defiantly a reoccurring picture I see in plenty of customers I visit.
Yes if taken to an extreme there could be a hit on staff levels but where I've seen it done most of the time it just frees staff up for keeping on top of things.
In a world run by accountants and lawyers, outsourcing is the future. All your company's existing processes get set in concrete. Enhancements require variations to the contract which cost more than the benefits. So the business ends up creating a shadow IT system using collections of excel spreadsheets that no one supports or understands because the people who wrote them have all left.
i agree fully automation is everything. My bosses fail to see this and havent promoted me to 'captain automater' despite numerous examples of scripting saving 1000s of hours and mistakes due to automating unofficially when i get the time. Theyd rather i (and many other people) just did the repetitive donkey work
I cannot stand watching people do those small piddly jobs manually when you know full well that they can be automated. Almost from the day I stepped out into the big wide world of IT as a career, working as a "tape monkey" in mainframe land, I've been an efficient person ( read: lazy bugger! ) who wants to avoid doing anything manual where it's possible to automate it. I want that time I'm saving, for myself so I can spend it learning new things, not waste it doing the same old monotonous rubbish day after day, week after week!
-Its everything that makes the $ move faster (yes I said that), but in our (Systems folks) daily lives it takes away the dull and boring. I've been trying to automate my boss for years but sadly the VP's see through it every time. I'll get there eventually
<and - thanks for the 2k of upvotes folks I just noticed I've gone silver>
As I am a consultant in EVA/IF in my company which could be mistaken for a famous fruity sauce , we have in most instances reduced incident and events by72% across the board in under 12 months , which means the headcount goes down so not a popular role with fellow staff members, but the ethos of automation is not new but it is the main driver at the moment and every thing our hackers do is just that hacking away at a keyboard and mouse to make the damn thing do want you want it to do. nearly all of this can all be automated using everything from PS scripts/workflow or bespoke automation application platforms.
I mean take valve software everybody quotes their flat world model as to why they are so successful but its more like total automation processes they use provides the ability to have a flat world model.
Valve
2nd biggest digital distribution platform on the net
increased profits by 50 % every year since the company founded
3rd biggest user of bandwidth on the internet
bigger BO hardware footprint than HP and dell combined
70 million users world wide
support system for 70 million users
over 1600 back office applications and the hardware for 3rd parties
support system for onboarding new client and existing clients
Now designs hardware also .
designs own OS and software
and all this from 350 staff from one office in Seattle...now that's why automation is king .
Try contacting them. Support system my ass. They simply don't have enough staff to deal with all the issues. They might be doing well now, but unless they sort out their platform and help customers they won't be for long. 4 Weeks 4 tickets and still not even a reply. Worst company I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Success won't last unless they re-evaluate their current business model.
Actually it's 2 - 6 days according to most users and the forums, as long as you put the proper info in the ticket, so you got banned/pished/trade banned/hijacked or bought something 6 months ago and now it is on sale and you want a refund, or you bought something even those the minimum specs told you not to...yada yada
Their is no response on Vac Ban or Ban's due to trade exploits. and that is great thing about automation it ignores all the morons and doesn't care(not saying you are).
I've really yet to work for a company that plans more than maybe a year two in advance (some set broad goals that may stretch out a bit further but little actual planning - this experience goes back just about 20 years now across almost 10 companies).
The landscape changes so much it doesn't make sense to ask those sorts of questions in my opinion. New things come along that may change the way we approach stuff. I remember VMware once said that server virtualization was somewhat of an accident, not even they believed there was a market for it at the time and they were building the tech(I was a vmware 1.0.2 for linux customer back in 1999).
You also have to analyze the risk and return of automation. For some things it make sense, for others it does not. If it takes significantly more time to automate something than time saved then it makes more sense to not do it. Don't automate everything just because you can you'll be wasting your time.
I remember I interviewed some dumb shit for a director of operations role (the guy was interviewing to be my boss, NO IDEA how he got past the phone screening I think because he had met our then CIO at some conference). He was one dangerous guy. He wanted to automate everything, he wanted everything custom. He felt having our own data center was a "risk", because if I or other critical members of the team left who would be able to operate it? I didn't have the words at the time to give him the response because he kept shifting gears every 30 seconds(The IT manager was interviewing this guy with me and after about 10 minutes stopped asking questions because the responses were incomprehensible).
But in the end I would of said it's much easier for our company to continue operating in the event I leave the company than if you go and build some really complicated custom stack of shit that nobody knows how to use other than you because it's fully custom. With what we do we can go to our suppliers like VMware, like HP, etc and they would help our company (if we needed), or go to independent consultants, people can get up to speed very quickly because it's not obscenely customized and automated.
I told my CIO even before I started talking to this nut job that his resume had tons of red flags all over it. I later revised that statement to him the next morning, saying those were not red flags, they were land mines. Obviously he didn't progress past that interview.
Take some crazy automation custom stack and well you have to recruit someone to come in and read the code, and hopefully understand how stuff works. Not quick. Also hope they don't declare the system terrible and go on a expedition to re-write it.
I spent two years simply migrating a company from one bad implementation of CFengine to a good one(wasn't my full time responsibility and I was working in a "four nines" environment so I had to be careful). I am absolutely confident if my team quit the replacements would have a FAR harder time grasping what is going on inside of the Chef automation tool rather than the infrastructure components that are used as "utility computing" (not "cloud computing"). I can count the number of "system admins" that I know personally on one hand that would get up to speed quickly on fancy Chef stuff, yet alone any of the newer bleeding edge automation tool sets.
The more I see Trevor write, the less I feel he actually knows. It seems like he just gets briefings and talks to marketing people and lives on the hype machine. Having a little lab to play around with doesn't count as experience, I don't care what kind of workload you think you can generate, sorry it doesn't matter.
I've really yet to work for a company that plans more than maybe a year two in advance (some set broad goals that may stretch out a bit further but little actual planning - this experience goes back just about 20 years now across almost 10 companies).
Not only that, but in large multinationals there often is tendency to change/reorg frequently. So if the way things are done is changed every, say, couple of years it can make things difficult. Sure, basic things can be automated but if processes constantly change, automation may be challenging.
This is my day to day job, I automate. I look at the processes being done and I replace them with systems or adjust them so they can be replaced by systems.
When I started working at a Market Research company they had a guy processing sample by hand. Open in excel, vlookups, import to SQL, SQL Stored Procedures to dedupe, export from SQL and stick on an SFTP for a call centre to deal with. He'd spend four hours a day doing this, Monday to Friday.
And, as the article mentions, he'd get it wrong, which had massive impacts for my role. So I replaced him with some VBA, it now runs automatically from a batch file, launches at 8am each day and repeatedly checks the incoming SFTP for sample, once arrived does all the processes he did before depositing it to the call centre and emailing me a confirmation it's run and a nice little tally of what we've received (which we never got before).
The company I worked for were so impressed the inaugurated an annual "Innovation" award and gave it to me and a nice cheque (I also won the second year, in a round about fashion, when someone from accounts submitted the code I wrote for them). When it came to moving on (as I'd automated both my and the girl I was hired to work alongside's month long workload into a batch of processes that took roughly four hours in the middle of the night when everyone else slept) they more than doubled my pay and sent me to Australia they wanted to keep me that much. Simply because I approach each task in this method.
Now I run a department of three people vs thrice that of other locals (whom bemoan the long hours and all the overtime) handling a higher volume of workload and most of my day is spent goofing off - as evident, I'm reading el'reg..
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