

Business Still Needs Sysadmins  - jrussbowman
http://joerussbowman.tumblr.com/post/11555544940/business-still-needs-sysadmins

======
munin
I think the author misses a lot of what the original article was saying. for
example,

> When you look at the pure dollars and cents, if the could was going to knock
> out the Sysadmin profession, it would have done it already.

in a lot of business cases, it has. my employer uses google apps, we have no
sysadmin for email/phones/etc. my school just migrated all of their undergrad
email accounts to google apps. I work with a big company that outsourced all
their email/blackberry etc stuff to google apps.

there are some businesses that have the special-case needs that the author
describes. but there are a whole lot that don't. yeah, it would be nice having
some local IT guys around to kick when email knocks out, but is it $500k/yr
nice when I can outsource that for $50k/yr?

the pie isn't gone. but it is shrinking, imo. that cute t-shirt that says "I
can replace you with a very small shell script"? yeah well... is it as funny
when it's happening to you? ;)

~~~
nodata
But in your example, the sys admin hasn't been replaced by a small shell
script. You've just outsourced some of the systems they would have looked
after.

~~~
nl
Yes, but now 1 sysadmin manages between 10 and 100 times more machines than
they used to[1].

What is more, each machine supports more people than it used to.

[1] [http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/2008/12/10/rent-or-own-amazon-
ec...](http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/2008/12/10/rent-or-own-amazon-ec2-vs-
colocation-comparison-for-hadoop-clusters/)

[2]
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/30/how-m...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/30/how-
many-servers-can-one-admin-manage/)

~~~
jrussbowman
The number of machines a sysadmin can support depends on what's running on
those machines. This is a case where raw averages can be extremely misleading.

------
poisonbit
Depends on the size and activity of the business.

Maybe there is no need for a 100% time sysadmin, maybe there is need for 30
sysadmins across different time zones.

But that's not now, that has been always like that.

[http://poisonbit.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/opensource-
clouds-...](http://poisonbit.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/opensource-clouds-and-
liar-paradoxes/)

------
serverascode
Amazon may be the 8000 pound gorilla, but up here in Canada people are still
concerned about the patriot and other similar legalities in terms of storing
our data in US companies or in the US. I hear this all the time, and not just
public organizations, but also startups.

Or maybe group clouds, like Universities banding together to create IaaS.

So, to conclude, don't forget about private clouds. :)

------
gaius
I've been writing a bit about this in my blog recently. Devs and sysadmins
serious about their careers need to move out of the back office and into the
front office. <http://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/scrum/>

