

The Future Role of the SysAdmin - drewvs
http://www.sourcefeed.us/?p=238

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madao
What a bit of drivel, as long as there are systems to be managed there will be
sysadmins, I work at a hosting shop and you roughly need one sysadmin for
every ten or so servers regardless of what they are, things just need to be
taken care of.

Mail queues need to be monitored and cleared, kernels patched, customer issues
need to be escalated. When you start getting into the size of a company with
over 100 non-technical staff you will find you need at least one or two admins
just to keep up with issues that come up.

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drewvs
Thanks for the input madao, but I disagree. First of all, I'm not saying
sysadmins are going away in any respect, but I do believe that with increased
efficiency there will be fewer admins needed for any given business.

I currently support over 150 production systems on Amazon, so your estimation
of 10 servers per sysadmin is outdated and inaccurate. Even by Instagram's own
admission they manage hundreds of systems with only 5 sysadmins. By your
calculation, Instagram would have needed at least double that.

