+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 de

+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.