Slashdot Mirror
The Days of SysAdmin Numbered?
gmkeegan writes "The Economist is running a story about Sun's new N1 operating system whose purpose is to make today's system administrators redundant. The idea is to virtualize the computer system so that the automated resource management software can add, remove and manage everything dynamically. The article mentions similar efforts by IBM, HP, and Microsoft."
Who manages the management system?
Vlad
The Raven
For this to work, there needs to be a very big advance in the area of AI. Otherwise, if anything breaks in a way not forseen by the designers, there would need to be a sysadmin to fix it.
This is more a marketing ploy than anything else.
this implies that there is management who can handle running this, or want to. most Managers don't know networking from a hole in the ground. Somebody's gotta set up the desktops and workstations, and keep them running...even if the software can handle it, hardware needs troubleshooting every now and then too
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And just who do they think is gonna make sure the machines are doing their job properly?
gone? Nah. Changing? Yeah, everyday.
Sent from your iPad.
All the CEOs and VPs with their MBAs are going to see these new systems and immediately replace the existing technology and start firing SysAdmins... then (I'm going to guess here) 41 days later they'll all be sitting in their offices asking out loud "what's wrong with the e-mail?" or "why can't I log in?"
Then they'll call up the old SysAdmins and offer to hire them back at hopefully double the salary.
You never really know how much you need something until it's gone.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Automating some of the work that a Sysadmin has to do won't make them redundant. Theres always something else to do. And anyone trusting the system to work correctly on its own with no human overseeing it is just asking for trouble.
...computer management of cars has obsoleted all auto mechanics. ...food processors put every chef out of a job. ...handwriting recognition eliminated postal workers. ..."eliza" makes George Bush irrelevant.
Hmm. On second thought...
-b
Since most business is small business, it doesn't change anything. As everyone has already pointed out, who will administer the adminstration tools? Who will fix the hardware problems? Who will run the wires or set up the WAP?
And for those of us who read the article, it is time to buy your Elvis white & rhinstone suit...
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Before Chicken Little comes and shouts that the sky is falling, I would dare say that this is just an extension of a trend that's been there.
As even simply part of a sales strategy, companies have been working on making things easier. Yes, sometimes this results in inadequate software, but in the market in general this makes it far easier to get companies to upgrade, update, and use new software. I don't know if the performance benefits are really great, but I know that companies have been working to cut down redundancies.
Does this mean that there won't be system administrators anymore? No. But I would say that system administrators are resources used up in ways secretaries used to. I remember when everybody wrote things by hand and gave them to secretaries to type up in offices. Now because people have better typing skills and typing is more important to even access information, there are fewer secretaries. Many secretaries are now far more multi-functional, handling numerous tasks in an office. The same will happen with system adminstrators.
Gone will be the days of hiding back in the server room with arcane tasks. There will be more work handling information patterns and purchasing and securing things, and less in the day-to-day routine kill of processes, recovering files for idiot users, and so on.
Personally, I hope the same will happen for programmers, so we stop calling simple coders programmers and go back to real work in programming.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
When a client can't articulate a need well enough for a seasoned sysadmin to decypher it most of the time how do they think that a PHB will be able to get the automanglement software to do what he wants? This might put reboot monkeys out of a job but it will not put many real sysadmins onto the streets.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think the aim of N1 isn't to replace the systems administrator, but rather, reduce the numbers of systems administrators needed for a large datacenter. Like automate the process of setting up new servers. Patch management. Compliance with FCO (field change orders). That kind of thing. (And probably more.) Come with things like Sun's CST (configuration service tracker) and what not. Make things much simpler to run with less people.
Given the number of unpatched hole-ridden mis-configured servers out there this would eliminate the most unreliable component. Average real-world sysadmin != Slashdot idealized sysadmin.
Sure, this will make system administrators obsolete, just as we don't need programmers any more now that we have compilers and RAD tools.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They're not out to eliminate the sysadmin, they're just trying to "do it right", to do the things that many intelligent sysadmins do already. It will eliminate some sysadmin jobs, where departments had too many people because their processes were inefficient, but the good sysadmins will still have jobs.
I've seen some companies running a unix datacenter with 100 machines and 30 unix admins, which is just crazy. Other places, I've seen 1000 machines run by 5 guys, which is how it should be. The guys at the smart places write good management scripts, and know how to scale their management of the systems well. Sun is just trying to encapsulate these things so that even the companies too dumb to do it on their own can now have such benefits.
11*43+456^2
That's helpdesk work, not system administration. If your job consists mostly of that, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're not a sysadmin.
Hunh? You sure about that?
You'd likely be correct if you're speaking of a big company, but your blanket statemnet is way off base. Smaller shops usually have an IT person or two, who do everything from architect systems to answer any and all tech support/help desk calls. If the servers, WAN, LAN and Internet pipe are all humming along - IOW, he's done the job of sysadmin well - the only thing left to screw up his day would be the users. ("Nawww!" sighs the audience, sarcasticly) Since small shops don't make a habit of getting new stuff in on a regular basis, there's not much else to do but tech support. To boot, once a company exec (owner, partner, CEO, whatever) knows you're good at fixing his screw ups, no matter the size of the company, they'll call you, no matter your job title. I've been there, and I know how he feels.
I'd ditch the elistist attitude, bud - anyone who keeps a companies IT infrastructure running is a Sysadmin. If you think about it, diversifying your knowledge, as well as you expectations, are the best way to keep yourself employed when there's people who are writing systems that want to make your job redundant.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
"But the biggest challenge, says Yousef Khalidi, chief technology officer for N1, was in packaging the technology. It will only be adopted if the nerds who run corporate systems co-operate, which they might not do if it creates too rapid change or even loses them their job."
...or maybe it was the fact your goal is to replace me instead of work with me to fix the problems you have with your EXISTING products?
Er...come again? What part about your product is supposed to make me want to install it? The fact you called me a nerd, or the fact that so far all you have is marketing hype and no real product?
I'm not going anywhere for a while, but you may be looking for a new job in the near future. What was your username?
G
This space intentionally left blank.
Any technical person worth their salt will be able to find productive work for the forseeable future. Sure you might have to make adjustments and it might take some time in the middle of a downturn, but you have nothing to complain about when compared to the average blue-collar worker whose company downsized, closed a plant or shut down completely.
That said, I'm still not that happy about the way certain industries can import labor instead of treating the people who are here better. At least most illegal immigrants are doing jobs that few citizens will take, and I think their status should be normalized to prevent abuse. Also, as long as I am this far off topic, there needs to be some normalization of labor conditions worldwide. Trade normalization is fundamentally unfair without it.
H-1B is meant to backfill the LACK of American tech talent, not replace it. Simply put, there aren't enough QUALIFIED US workers to satisfy demand. Notice I say qualified. Not 'History Teacher turned MCSE' or 'Accountant turned Flash "Programmer"'. Qualified Software Engineers, Ph.D MEs, Chem-Es, etc. There just aren't enough.
One of the stipulations of H-1B is that there must not exist an equally qualified US candidate, and the H-1B MUST be paid at least 95% of the average wage for the given job in the given market. There won't be any senior design engineers working for 20k in Boston. People can dick around with this policy by making the qualifications too high, but it usually gets caught.
These visas are a serious pain for employers to obtain and administrate. In all the places I've worked that employ H-1Bs, they'd MUCH rather hire and pay for qualified American workers. No worries about the 6 year limit, no time in legal. Unfortuanately, they just don't exist in great numbers. Americans that bemoan this need to, for the most part, just go back to school. Knowing SQL server just isn't enough anymore.
I know a few so-called-nerds who could kick this so-called-journalist's arse. It's a troll, people; but it's also a troll that has the ear of management wonks who may listen. If you're a small department without an IT manager, it would serve you well to work on educating the decision makers as to what your job entails, your job responsibilities as defined by management and also good system administrator practices, and how you're overworked as it is. Frame it so they don't think that this system (if it works) will save them expensive wages, but it will improve their IT department's customer service and add value to the organization by giving them more time to research and impliment new technologies.
Anyone smell vapor? If it can automatically reconfigure machines for demand, what happens when the demand switches throughout the day (IE email in the morning, pr0n filtering at lunch, and facilities management systems just before punchout)? How long does it take to reconfigure a machine? What if you get a DOS attack aimed to entice this management software to start reconfiguring a bunch of machines? What if it's a DOS attack from inside the firewall?
The system is supposed to save "days" of machine-configuration time, but how often do you configure new servers? If you were deploying a commodity system (could custom systems be automated?), wouldn't you use a system image or other running system as a base?
Indeed, in a way Sun might attract more Sysadmins to their platform with things like this.
After all, who wouldn't like an admin job where all the mundane stuff is automatic and all your time is available for the really interesting stuff?
You're absolutely correct, but when your job consists solely of those items you'll be making a couple of bucks over minimum wage.
When the elite becomes commonplace so does the salary. Every CS degree times every "ease of use" advancement equals a devaluation of the labor.
This is nothing new. The first few operators of a cotton gin were highly paid specialists, now it's unskilled labor delegated to the 'kid' who just applied for work.
Get used to it, if you're under 25 you may have to live through the same cycle three more times in your working lifespan.
KFG
A number of years ago (in the 1995 timeframe), I was told by my boss that 1 admin per 30 Windows machines was about normal, and 1 admin per 100 Unix machines was roughly equivalent. My later experience roughly bears that out. With NT 4.0 networks, you need a second person fairly early. At about 20 machines, assuming you're growing quickly, you'll want help. You'll want to add another person at about 50, and you should be good with three up to 100 clients or so.
:-) )
Windows 2000 has added many automated tasks in Active Directory, but when I last worked with it (without service packs), those things tended to be a bit flaky at times. I suspect you probably need the same three guys at 50 machines, but you can probably scale them to 150-200. This is purely theoretical, and is based on a six-month contract learning and setting up a brand-new Windows 2000 network, back pre-SP1. I'd be interested to hear from any experienced 2K admins whether or not my wild-assed guess is accurate.
I'm now the sole admin in a network of about a hundred Linux machines. I'm busy as hell, but I can keep up with things. Scripting is lifesaving. With a well-set-up cluster, you can script almost anything, and can scale from 2 to 2000 machines in much less than linear time. (ie, 2000 machines is probably 20 times as hard as 2, not 1000 times.) I could definitely use help, but I bet that two of us could scale to at least 400 boxes.
As other people are pointing out, what Sun's solution is going to do is replace all the low-end stuff, all the routine things that the beginners do. That's going to make it really hard to break into the sysadmin market... either you already know it all and can run the whole network, or you don't really know anything and can't get hired. It's a nasty catch-22.... you'll need experience with large networks to get experience with large networks. It'll suck to be coming out of college into that kind of environment.
In general, I tend to think that you're not really doing your job well, as a sysadmin, unless you're putting yourself out of a job every day. A really well-run network should run great whether or not you happen to show up that day -- or that week, or that month. That's sort of an abstract Holy Grail... real networks don't work like that, but it's a good goal. The closer you approximate it, the better you're doing. If you drop dead tomorrow and the company isn't terribly injured, you were doing a good job. (or you weren't doing anything
I suspect that nearly all tech jobs are temporary.... eventually the tech will change and render most jobs obsolete. This is true of technology in general, but it's happening a lot faster in computers than in other, older technologies, like autos or televisions. Obsolescence happens quickly, well within individual techy lifetimes.
Remember, computers are very new, compared with most human technologies, and everything is still jury-rigged and labor-intensive. Gradually that's going to go away, and there will be a need for fewer and fewer people doing the jobs we do today. But... as these lower layers get sorted out and finalized into best practices and insta-networks (just add a drop of water) a whole new class of jobs will arise, USING those networks to accomplish things. And I suspect that those jobs will be tremendously more interesting than the ones we have now.
Just like we need far, far fewer man-hours to make a ton of steel than we did in 1900, we'll need far fewer creators-of-networks. That's the nature of capitalism: creative destruction. Overall it's very good, but it's hard on the people in the middle of it.
Seriously, I had people tell me that they wouldn't need any "systems administrators" because it was "just like Windows". Heck... anyone could administer it. This was from a middle school principal. Who last year paid our company several thousand dollars to set up his Win2K middle school lab so that his students couldn't fsck it up.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Seems like there's a lot of hype and misunderstanding about what this is all about. The journalist writing the article didn't help any, as he didn't seem to understand what this is about either. I work for a company that writes this sort of software, so I should know something about this...
Firstly, this is not really designed for desktop machines, as I understand. The main focus is servers. You link a whole bunch of servers together, set some sort of global policy rules (eg the web server can have as much CPU on as many machines as it wants), and its up to this smart software to intelligently enforce the policy.
Secondly, presuming the software has a fairly substantial cost per seat, who's going to use it on a set of workstations where you can't even predict whether they're going to be turned on or not. Unless you're running really CPU intensive stuff that can be parallelised really well, then what's the point?
Thirdly, I don't think many sysadmins are going to find themselves out of work due to this. There's going to need to be intelligent thought put into setting up this "global policy" stuff in the first place, and both admin and business will need to cooperate to work it out...
This sounds pretty silly to me. As you said I automate just about everything with scripts and programs I've written. It sounds as they have just bundled up these common scripts and made them all into a master program that can manage groups of machines. Nothing new there.
;)
As most admins are way overworked in my experience I think the most this will do is trim out the lame ass monkeys that can only work through GUI tools and maybe slow new job growth. Still as new job growth has already been slowed down beyond reason by the economy I doubt this could hurt the growth any further. Maybe these tools will let the admins work 60 hours a week instead of 80.
The rest is all pipe dreams. It's easy to promise human-like abilities but hard to deliver.. as anyone who has ever tried there hand at programming AI has found. Some things might get easier but as the overall systems grow more complex there will be just as many admins.
This Playstation junkie can hack code around the dumb ass of any automation tools any day of the week.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
...while walking past the graveyard.
... and extrapolate a bit]). But within three years you had better have moved to a new job description. Starting now!
Things that were difficult become easy. Live with it. I started as a programmer on an IBM 7094. Fortran II was the in thing, but if you wanted to run a large program you wrote it in FAP or MAP, because computation was expensive, and assembler was faster.
The last assembler I even looked at was for CP/M. and then I was only writing a serial port driver for a terminal that had a second I/O port (for an auxillary printer).
Now I've pretty much dropped C in favor of Python and Ruby (due to company policies, I pretty much missed most of Java).
The jobs change! When I got into the programming profession in 1970 (approx.) I expected the profession to last about 20 years. I consider myself to have been exceptionally fortunate that it's lasted until now. True, it's meant I had to use MSAccess, but outside of that...
And I have done sysadmin work. On a Unix System V Altos box. (I was a pretty crude sysadmin, and I never got any training, but I kept it up, and allowed remote users access to a database that I wrote and maintained. [O, I am the cook, and the captain too, and crew of the Nancy Bell. The bosun tight, and the midshipmite, and the crew of the captains gig.]) I had to wear all the hats on that job. But I did it, and it stayed up.
That was years ago. Now I'm a programmer again. When they decided they needed a DBA, they hired outside. (Good person, but I wasn't pleased.) I think my boss' boss was empire building, and hiring more expensive people made him look more important, but I'll never find out for sure. Still, I didn't loose. And it might be because I'm getting near retirement.
Your lives will change! This is but one of the straws in the wind. Accept the fact, and you can get ready for it. Deny it and you will capsize and drown.
Moore's law is one of the factors here. It is becoming cheaper to use general purpose programs than to write specialized ones that are more efficient. Don't think about shell scripts (though that is where it started). Imagine libraries of shell scripts, with descriptions of what they do. Searchable descriptions. Accessible with an interface similar to Google's. The first versions don't work. The second versions are clumsy. The third versions are limited. The fourth versions... In five or six years, sysadmin won't be a highly skilled job. This has been in progress ever since DEC first wrote the computer installation expert system. This has been in progress ever since the first word processor, or the first spreadsheet. How many secretaries do you see anymore?
So look for where they won't be heading, and follow your star (if you don't like the job, you can't earn enough to make it a good one).
E.g.:
1) I don't have any entreprenurial skills. So I choose the technical path. (Yeah, you can combine them, if you have the right skill set. And the extra skills would have helped me. But that's not who I am. So I picked my career path with that in mind.)
2) Estimate how long the job will last. I estimated 20 years. I got lucky, and it lasted longer, though it sure did morph in ways that I didn't expect.
3) Evaluate how much preperation it will take vs. how long it will last. Again I got lucky. By the time I found out that I wasn't cut out to be a mathematician or a physicist, I only needed a couple of courses to become a programmer (well... Statistician, but that was because that title paid $150 a month better. The job was really programmer.)
4) Start early. I goofed here. I was nearly graduating before I found my mistake. But I got lucky.
5) Keep you eyes open. The world is an unstable place, and programmers (and sysadmins) are some of the people who are destabilizing it (so don't complain). Tech changes are coming faster all the time, so keep your eyes on what's coming down the path.
On point 5: The automated sysadmin won't be here in workable form this year. But don't count on model 1 not showing up. And next year model 2, and perhaps 3. That's only two years to get ready, not a lot of time, but probably enough if you start preparing now. The sysadmin jobs won't really start evaporating until model 4 comes out (the one that really starts removing the skills from the job [you just might, however, look at how Mandrake handles the sysadmin task
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.