Re: The future of Sysadmining.
Why is that a bad thing? Why should systems administrators have to know how infrastructure works, if the infrastructure is cheap enough to be disposable and there are things that easily configure it? Ideological purity?
Look, the point of IT is to make money. Your switch and your storage array don't make money. The applications they support do. If you can reduce the cost of managing and maintaining those switches, storage arrays, operating systems and so forth then you make more money from the use of the applications in question. If you are more efficient than your competitors, you win. That's business.
I could build you a car from scratch right up to the point that we stopped using carburetors. After fuel injection came in, I can't build you a car anymore, or even fix it. But I can still drive one. I've been driving one for a decade or more and I'll be driving for decades to come. The inability to repair all aspects of the car doesn't prevent me from using it and gaining value from it.
Systems administrators no longer need to know the sorted details of their disk arrays or how to futz with a switches command line. If push comes to shove on that, they can always bust out the manual, and that's available online. And we all have many ways of getting online.
I learned Cisco switches back in the early Catalyst 2600 days. Have I played with a Nexus from the command line level? No. Could I work it out after only a few minutes? Yes! The internet is full of knowledge and I only need to grok the basics before I'm off to the races.
Meanwhile, could I get 15 years of productivity out of that Nexus without ever dropping to it's command line? With Puppet, you're goddamned rights I could.
So on the one hand, I can orchestrate a delicate ballet of hundreds of thousands of devices using a tool called Puppet. I can be a highly efficient administrator that provides a good return on investment for my employer, but I fail in some ideologically "pure" fashion because I am not infinitely familiar with the details of how every single device works.
On the other hand, I could learn every single detail of every single device I use and configure each and every one of them from the lowest level interface available, with zero orchestration across the entire estate. I will likely need 5x as many administrators to run that estate. I don't provide efficient IT services for my employer, but I meet an arbitrary "pureness" of philosophy.
If you view the second option as the desirable one, you are bad at business.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
