In case you haven’t noticed, the world of system administration is changing and the sand is shifting right underneath the sysadmins’ feet. In a way this is exciting, it is an opportunity to learn new things, to overcome new challenges and to adapt to an ever so changing environment. It is also a trap for the unsuspecting , the ones who are not paying attention as the shuttle to 21st century system management takes off.

What is going on you ask? well, public clouds like EC2 or Joyent are becoming viable solutions for ‘established’ businesses not just adventurous ones.Even better, there are clouds on top of clouds now, heroku, OpenShift, Appengine,etc. promise to give you all the elasticity and ease of a cloud without having to ever bother with AWS APIs or AMIs .  R&D teams want more involvement in production , or operations want R&D to own up to the mess they call ‘code’ and taste their own dog food and feel the pain of deploying those nasty jars or dumb rpms, newer hardware shipping with more cores, the CTO wants a private cloud, continuous integration gave birth to continuous deployment, small and big companies alike becoming more open about sharing their practices and tools. Many of these things might have started with web 1.0 and the dotcom boom but wasn’t quite mature enough, then 2.0 came and it all helped shape this shift.

What was once an exclusive, large investment and long lead time endeavour has become available to anyone with a valid credit card. Need a few instances in APAC?check. New release needs more RAM?coming right up.

You don’t just have to manage a few boxes in the rack down the hall anymore but you need to find a way to manage configuration of distributed environments that may or may not have the same settings everywhere.Knowing how to add a persistent static route through your system’s sysconfig is not going to matter. Sooner or later you ll need a configuration management system and start looking at puppet or chef or cfengine, you ll figure you need your jenkins or bamboo server to do more than it does,  and that you need to be ‘open’ to grant developers’ access to production systems.

The truth is, quality development teams will really no longer need a sysadmin or a team of sysadmins. They can and will automate things from the moment code is committed all the way to the production deployment but developers usually focus on R&Dish things rather than operational aspects of the production environemnt and that is where your experience will shine. You can teach them about monitoring, about trending, about execution, about 24×7 coverage, about availability, about cool things you can do with your L7 load balancers.  This is great, but is probably not enough for you to secure your place in the 21st century system management. You need to start learning new skills, you need to start thinking about the bigger picture, mining your data in the logs to pinpoint patterns or trends, looking at the software architecture and giving feedback to R&D, automating your own tasks so that you have more time to learn even more. How is your math by the way?what about statistics?well, you better dust off those books and re-activate those brains cells because I guarantee you that things will grow exponentially to the point where we can no longer depend on our intuitions and ‘builtin pattern recognition’ system.

Of course, you might have a job in a government agency or a small college or somewhere where all they do is sustaining engineering then you might be able to coast and not have to worry about any of that  ’21st century stuff’.

If you are however in the private business space or thrive on learning and adapting to challenges then take off your sysadmin hat , put it away in a safe corner when the time comes to gut  a box late at night when you are bored and miss those ‘good ol’ times’ and put on your computer science/software engineer white coat and enjoy the ride