Hardware administration has shifted left. Most places work in VMs these days, and many have little or no hardware of their own at all. More and more hardware is

Hardware administration has shifted left. Most places work in VMs these days, and many have little or no hardware of their own at all. More and more hardware is being owned and operated by fewer and fewer big shops, many of whom provide services to those who need VMs. Classic systems administration is also shifting left. Either you go with the shift, or you find a way to make yourself useful to those who are left. What is called DevOps today would be a case of the latter, although there are those of us who have been doing that same kind of stuff for twenty, thirty, or even more years - we were doing DevOps before DevOps was a name that had been coined. As more and more stuff moves into the cloud, many of us will become Platform Engineers. We don’t do DevOps much any more, except for the big platforms that really need that. The rest will be providing the tools and guard rails that the developers need to allow them to do quick self-service with “serverless” frameworks, built on top of the tools provided by the big cloud providers.