> Who do you think is writing the playbooks for ansible? How do you think you can even write those things without first having a deep understanding of how the s

> Who do you think is writing the playbooks for ansible? How do you think you can even write those things without first having a deep understanding of how the system works The sys-admins don’t even know what ansible is. The devs are writing the playbooks and trying to convince the sys-admins that terraform and packer/docker are great tools while the sys-admins are still remoting into windows servers and clicking though graphical installer dialogues to configure the oracle servers “just so”. As for the “deep understanding” that was replaced with ready built AMI’s and packer/docker configs ages ago. You don’t need a local expert when you have the end result readily downloadable from a central trusted source. (And embarrassingly the available images are often better than what the local sys-admin thinks is top of the line). And at the end of the day, while it’s extremely cool to see someone utilize 20 years of experience to squeeze out an extra 15% of performance from your setup... well an extra server which adds +98% performance costs like 10$ a month, and the expert of 20 years is just not cost effective. There’s a culture clash, and it’s not because expertise isn’t valued. It’s just that a lot of old sys-admins have spent their entire carriers optimizing against targets that are no longer relevant, and teams can get by perfectly well without them. Truth is that you honestly don’t need a sys-admin or DBA on modern team. The ‘kids’ do just fine without them, and just spin up the systems on AWS/Azure/GKS with a blatant disregard for the fact that they “do not yet have the needed seniority to carry out such important tasks”. And if the horrible complexity of it all becomes to Much, they spin up 3-4 variants of the infrastructure and use the one that works best in performance and reliability testing, without ever needing to seek the alter of the almighty sys-admin with gifts of gold and silver in order to bless their endeavor and be allowed the extra couple of servers. We don’t have coffee machine admins because coffee machines are trivial in the modern software company (even though they do of-cause need regular maintainer and cleaning and are extremely important). The same is true of sys-admins, they are no longer needed because the system procurement and provisioning are trivial (even if they also need regular maintenance and cleaning and are of-cause extremely important).