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With any non-trivial assortment of servers, you need a dedicated sysadmin. The security issues alone should dictate this, but your developers don't need to be

With any non-trivial assortment of servers, you need a dedicated sysadmin. The security issues alone should dictate this, but your developers don't need to be worrying about sysadmin stuff. They need to be coding. I totally agree with proper deployment procedures. But having them doesn't eliminate the sysadmin at all. Sysadmin should be deploying standard packages that are necessary for the system, along with updates for them. Developers should be deploying in-house code, and updates for that. I worked at a company that hired a sysadmin too early. When he quit, I ended up doing his duties and mine, too. Of course, I automated 99% of it and everyone was happy. That was really early in the life of the company. Later, when it came necessary to hire one, they didn't. They'd expect a developer to deal with the issues, and were always dissatisfied with the time it took, and the lackluster results. Eventually it got so bad they hired a dedicated sysadmin again. Now, unlike the past, they actually needed one and he was busy all the time. Developers stopped being unproductive for weeks at a time, working on projects they didn't understand and couldn't complete satisfactorily. For a startup, yes, skip the sysadmin at first. But once you have a complex system, hire one. It'll save your company.

illumin8 15y ago
+1 - you can automate deployment all you want, but when something goes wrong with your production site (and it inevitably will), do you want to pull your top developers off of whatever new features they are working on and ask them to troubleshoot and fix production? Sysadmins will always be a necessary evil when you are dealing with hundreds of servers, physical, virtual, or cloud. The tools and process will change. We have gone from physical Unix boxes (Sun, HP, etc) to virtual Linux boxes, to cloud servers, but sysadmins are still doing the heavy lifting of designing and building highly scalable systems. I would say that sysadmins should look at moving into systems architecture roles, since one sysadmin will be able to manage hundreds of systems rather than a few dozen in the future. You really need architecture, networking, and performance tuning experience in order to succeed when you are managing more than a handful of systems.

illumin8 15y ago

+1 - you can automate deployment all you want, but when something goes wrong with your production site (and it inevitably will), do you want to pull your top developers off of whatever new features they are working on and ask them to troubleshoot and fix production? Sysadmins will always be a necessary evil when you are dealing with hundreds of servers, physical, virtual, or cloud. The tools and process will change. We have gone from physical Unix boxes (Sun, HP, etc) to virtual Linux boxes, to cloud servers, but sysadmins are still doing the heavy lifting of designing and building highly scalable systems. I would say that sysadmins should look at moving into systems architecture roles, since one sysadmin will be able to manage hundreds of systems rather than a few dozen in the future. You really need architecture, networking, and performance tuning experience in order to succeed when you are managing more than a handful of systems.