sgtrock

Authored Comments

sgtrock
System administrator responsibilities: 9 critical tasks

I both agree and disagree with you. :) Yes, a contractor sysadmin has to adapt to a client's practices. However, to write an article such as this without mentioning what is happening to the industry and the transformative affect it is having on the job leaves the reader with at best an incomplete picture.

For example, I work for a fairly large U.S. based corporation (approaching 100,000 employees). We are just taking baby steps towards adopting DevOps practices today but it's clear to just about all of us if you're not on the Agile/DevOps train you're likely to be run over. At that, we're very late to the game with many of our competitors and suppliers years ahead of us.

In other words, I think that any article about sysadmin practices that doesn't discuss the impact of the truly transformative shift in the way that they will be doing their jobs in the very near future is doing the readers a disservice.

Does that all make sense?

sgtrock
System administrator responsibilities: 9 critical tasks

To be honest, I think this article is not exactly on target these days.

For example, "Maintain lists of your servers?" That's an OK approach if you're maintaining one server and maybe a dozen PCs. Even a small shop has too many devices to manage by hand any more. Besides, what about the need to maintain container images that are deployed to third party services? A far better recommendation would be, "Learn how to use auto-discovery tools and how to integrate them with your CMDB."

Automation -- "...write scripts or use external tools..." A far better recommendation would be, learn the concepts around Infrastructure As Code. Learn to use tools like Ansible instead of doing any task by hand. Learn how to use version control systems like git to manage your playbooks, config files, scripts, etc.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the world of IT is changing incredibly rapidly. Agile and DevOps practices are penetrating into every organization. The practices that are outlined in this article simply don't align with that new world. Sysadmins have to adapt if they are going to remain relevant.