Also, at least from what I've witnessed, the kind of sysadmin activities often stated as those that cloud eliminates was already becoming a vanishingly small element of the day-to-day work involved in being a sysadmin.
It was already going away, and cloud was not the reason. But with the whole cloud = ditch sysadmins, and the weird way that 'devops' was interpreted to mean a similar thing, a whole lot of baby got thrown out alongside the bathwater.
Virtualization, the maturity of modern networking, compute and storage systems, and the sheer capacity of each atomic piece of hardware means that kind of stuff had already become a once-every-couple-of-years kinda task for most sysadmins, except the few still stuck in some kind of backwards anachronistic environment.
> Also, at least from what I've witnessed, the kind of sysadmin activities often stated as those that cloud eliminates was already becoming a vanishingly small element of the day-to-day work involved in being a sysadmin.
This. Most of my work is not technical and consists of technical-ish meetings, and budget arguments.
Automation is part of that, but also that a lot of stuff is fairly robust and works (mostly) after initial config. Three weeks of setup, plus some shakedown (and a few late nights when the new mission-critical system stutters), but then it's mostly autopilot, or scheduled maintenance.
It was already going away, and cloud was not the reason. But with the whole cloud = ditch sysadmins, and the weird way that 'devops' was interpreted to mean a similar thing, a whole lot of baby got thrown out alongside the bathwater.
Virtualization, the maturity of modern networking, compute and storage systems, and the sheer capacity of each atomic piece of hardware means that kind of stuff had already become a once-every-couple-of-years kinda task for most sysadmins, except the few still stuck in some kind of backwards anachronistic environment.