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Gearing Up for SysAdmin Day 2015: The Ever-changing Role of System Administrator

FormerMember
FormerMember Less than one minute read time

As we go on

We remember

All the times we...

Managed massive mainframes

Okay, okay, so maybe those aren’t the exact lyrics to Vitamin C’s “Graduation.” But as time has passed and technology has evolved, the role of SysAdmin has sort of graduated, too. From managing mainframes to servers, mainstream virtualization, the cloud and beyond, the past 10 years alone have seen some pretty dramatic shifts come to the role of the SysAdmin. And with so much on the horizon, one thing that’s certain is that we’ll see the role of SysAdmin evolve even more in the next 10 years.

So, to celebrate SysAdmins everywhere and in honor of SysAdmin Day 2015 coming up on July 31st, we’d like to hear your comments on how you think:

1. The role of SysAdmin has changed over the past 10 years

2. The role of SysAdmin will change over the next 10 years

Use the comments section below to share your thoughts on each by July 6th and we’ll give you 250 thwack points as a token of our appreciation (not that we need an excuse to show you our appreciation).

  • FormerMember
    FormerMember

    Points have been added to your accounts.

  • I agree with George S., though I jumped in a little later while AIX Mainframes were still being spun up, but Windows/Linux Servers were becoming suitable replacements.

    I now support nearly 200 servers running anything from Windows Server 2003 (gasp) to Server 2012R2, as well as the variety of operating systems and applications that both manage and run on top of all of these guys. It is impossible to be an expert at anything, though I am regularly called one, which makes me feel like a fraud emoticons_wink.png.  It seems that I become knowledgeable enough about one technology and the currently deployed version even, and then move on to the next technology that I have to come up to speed on. It is an overwhelming flood of self-training (though I often enjoy the challenge), that ends up being left behind by the time I come back to revisit the next upgrade to that system. I am thankful for the network of individuals who choose to share their experiences and resolutions to the issues we all face in being named an expert on something that we honestly are not. I look around and see that there are thousands upon thousands of us keeping these ships afloat, and thankfully we end up making it all continue to operate.

    As we move into the realization that security cannot be an afterthought, I believe that decisions to implement something or maintain a system in a way that does not make it secure, will become more and more public; possibly even the shaming/"making examples of" administrators that cannot move at this clip, while securing systems (I think that is all of us). Hopefully this results in more specialized positions again that may have different titles than those of yesteryear, since the roles most certainly will be different.

  • I've been doing this for a long time...When I started, a lot was defined by vendor specific OS. If you your shop was IBM, you concentrated on IBM. They players have changed at an ever increasingly lightning pace. You might have one or two connections with outside vendors (usually modem based, but I did have a transaction system that sent data over a dedicated line to a reel tape machine for downstream processing on a Sperry-Univac machine). Security was confined to keeping the computer room door locked! Then, you learned by doing and reading manuals, today you learn by doing and "googling" or forums like this.

    Over the course of time it's morphed into support everything!

    Today instead of supporting 3-4 VAX machines and 3 PCs. I support 125 desktops, a VMware environment, multiple OS's (W8, Win2008 and 2012, AIX, Linux - 2 flavors, firewalls and mobile devices and a host of interfaces with about 20 different vendors. I am less of an "expert" today, and more like I have enough knowledge to be dangerous! emoticons_wink.png

  • Even after that moment to GUI we still invest a lot in developing new CLI's, Even windows there are things that used to have GUI's that now you can only do via a CLI and/or PowerShell.

    Now days we are just deploying servers via virtual templates in 10-15 minutes, which used to take us hours and sometimes days.

  • This discussion got me thinking about interfaces.  Ten years ago Windows Servers were being converted from NT to 2000. We were hunting down drivers over slow internet (gig internet to the house these days).  Now, 2008 is being converted to 2012.  Who would have guessed that a sysadmin would have to deal with a Metro interface.  Ten years ago you would have been hard pressed to find a network machine with any sort of GUI.  If you didn't know the command line command or abbreviation then you couldn't do anything with it.  Today, most everything has a GUI or browser window.  Compare mobile phones from ten years ago to phones now.  Mobile phone is a misnomer.  The phone is only a small part of the system now.  It's interesting to thing about the interfaces of the future.  Maybe they will be similar to the gestures used in the movie Minority Report or maybe it will be audio commands.  Either way there may be some kicking and screaming along with the "improvement".

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