5 ms·

Would you expect all sysadmins to become programmers?

q3k 8y ago
Would it be beneficial? Yes. Is it necessary for most cases? No. I do think, however, the moment when you infrastructure becomes defined by code (eg. you start using any CM system) then you should be training your sysadmins to program more and duct tape existing solutions less. Operations become vastly easier to scale and maintain if you can defer their logic to actual services with clearly defined business logic rather than a mess of ansible configs and bash scripts.
k__ 8y ago
Maybe some will? My take is: The complex admin work will be going to the cloud providers. The rest (besides some niche stuff) will get so simple a programmer can do it on the side. Admins that don't learn to program are left behind. Only those who have some cushy full time employment, were they can't be let go, will remain.
- merlincorey 8y ago
  > Admins that don't learn to program are left behind. Only those who have some cushy full time employment, were they can't be let go, will remain. While I personally am a Software Engineer + Systems Engineer combination perfect for modern Devops... I do not agree with you one bit. There will always be a place for non-programming systems administrators -- especially as we get more and more systems over time. Will those administrators be able to /scale/ to managing 100s or 1000s of system without learning some sort of programming language or configuration management system? Probably not. However, there are plenty of businesses out there that only have a handful of servers and services which can totally (and more cheaply) be managed manually. Automation has an up-front cost that doesn't always make sense for the business to spend.
lamontcg 8y ago
Yes. And back in the day sysadmins wrote programs like tcp_wrappers, postfix, sendmail, etc. It was definitely common and encouraged if not expected. The idea that system admins should be able to get away with never professionally stepping up to doing programming is a late-90s/early-00s aberration that was generated by the need to scale up during the dot com boom before good automation practices existed. And it is not a good thing and it stunts intellectual growth. Devops is in some sense back-to-the-future by tearing down an artificial wall that never should have been made in the first place.
- simtel20 8y ago
  Weitse, the author of 2 of those tools, is the only systems person at his university who I'm aware of who has done a lot of tooling. Allman, author of sendmail, was not a sysadmin by any stretch of the imagination. IIRC he was a grad student then systems hacker who was surrounded by unix and programming. Sure, lots of systems people program and love programming, but the job isn't to write write tcp_wrappers, postfix, sendmail etc. it's to do what's needed to make sure that such things run, which is a different kind of programming.

q3k 8y ago

Would it be beneficial? Yes. Is it necessary for most cases? No. I do think, however, the moment when you infrastructure becomes defined by code (eg. you start using any CM system) then you should be training your sysadmins to program more and duct tape existing solutions less. Operations become vastly easier to scale and maintain if you can defer their logic to actual services with clearly defined business logic rather than a mess of ansible configs and bash scripts.

k__ 8y ago

Maybe some will? My take is: The complex admin work will be going to the cloud providers. The rest (besides some niche stuff) will get so simple a programmer can do it on the side. Admins that don't learn to program are left behind. Only those who have some cushy full time employment, were they can't be let go, will remain.

merlincorey 8y ago
> Admins that don't learn to program are left behind. Only those who have some cushy full time employment, were they can't be let go, will remain. While I personally am a Software Engineer + Systems Engineer combination perfect for modern Devops... I do not agree with you one bit. There will always be a place for non-programming systems administrators -- especially as we get more and more systems over time. Will those administrators be able to /scale/ to managing 100s or 1000s of system without learning some sort of programming language or configuration management system? Probably not. However, there are plenty of businesses out there that only have a handful of servers and services which can totally (and more cheaply) be managed manually. Automation has an up-front cost that doesn't always make sense for the business to spend.

lamontcg 8y ago

Yes. And back in the day sysadmins wrote programs like tcp_wrappers, postfix, sendmail, etc. It was definitely common and encouraged if not expected. The idea that system admins should be able to get away with never professionally stepping up to doing programming is a late-90s/early-00s aberration that was generated by the need to scale up during the dot com boom before good automation practices existed. And it is not a good thing and it stunts intellectual growth. Devops is in some sense back-to-the-future by tearing down an artificial wall that never should have been made in the first place.

simtel20 8y ago
Weitse, the author of 2 of those tools, is the only systems person at his university who I'm aware of who has done a lot of tooling. Allman, author of sendmail, was not a sysadmin by any stretch of the imagination. IIRC he was a grad student then systems hacker who was surrounded by unix and programming. Sure, lots of systems people program and love programming, but the job isn't to write write tcp_wrappers, postfix, sendmail etc. it's to do what's needed to make sure that such things run, which is a different kind of programming.