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It's absolutely fine and I'd argue essential to know Linux system administration even for people who mostly work in the cloud. From my recent experience sys adm

It's absolutely fine and I'd argue essential to know Linux system administration even for people who mostly work in the cloud. From my recent experience sys admin skills seem to be a lost art - people no longer have to care about the underpinnings of a Linux system and when problems hit it shows. It's interesting from a job market standpoint how little incentive there is to learn the basics when more and more we are seeing developers being made responsible for ops and admin tasks.

wjnc 4y ago
I see this in my firm. Non-IT management loves to resort to the lowest denominator of 'systems', that is - systems built by people who are not trained as administrators nor experienced, but mainly follow online guides /and deliver/ (at p50). When I mention the resilience of the systems we maintain to senior directors the most common reply is that 1. the activities are not production and 2. the cost of letting our proper IT-departments handle things go way beyond the willingness to pay. When I reply that our non-production activities are still unmissable for anything more than a few days (which defines it as production for me, but not in our IT-risk landscape) I usually get greeted with something along the lines that in all things cloud all is different. For non-techies I think it's just hard to phantom that most of the effort in maintaining systems is in resilience, not in the just scripting it to work repeatedly.
- amtamt 4y ago
  So many people somehow believe a single VM with no disk snapshot/ back-up, having a floating IP, running ad hoc scripts to bring up production workload is "production quality", only because it is running in cloud.
- Fiahil 4y ago
  They most likely resorted to skipping IT involvement because the department is difficult to work with. "The cloud" is both a technical solution for flexible workload requirements, and a political solution to allow others to continue delivering when IT is quoting them 3 months of "prep work" for setting up a dev environment and 2 to 4 weeks for a single SSL certificate. As a consultant, I am confronted to hostile IT requirements daily. Oftentimes, departments hiring us end up setting and training their own Ops teams outside of IT. despite leading to incredible redundancy, that's often credited as a huge success for that department, because of the gained flexibility.
jbotdev 4y ago
I think nowadays requiring that all application developers should also do ops (DevOps?) is a bad idea. Sure they should have basic shell skills, but when you’re on Kubernetes or similar, understanding what’s underneath is not vital. Instead, rely on specialized teams that actually want to know this stuff, and become the experts you escalate to only when things really go sideways and the abstractions fail (which is rare if you do it well). If your budget is too small for this, there are always support contracts. As someone who’s been hiring for both sides, I see this reflected in candidates more and more. The good devs rarely know ops, and the good ops rarely code well. For our “platform” teams, we end up just hiring good devs and teaching them ops. I think the people that are really good at both often end up working at the actual cloud providers or DevOps startups.
- blinkingled 4y ago
  But then there's the problem that now you have two teams - ops team doesn't understand the app and app team doesn't understand the ops/infra side. I of course agree with your point that there should be two teams but you need a few guys who understand both app dev and ops/infra/OSes/k8s internals etc. And finding these people has been nearly impossible.
  - MaKey 4y ago
    I am one of those rare people :) Coming from the Linux sysadmin and networking side I'm currently working on going deeper into programming and expanding my knowledge there. In Europe the pay for someone like me appears to be capped at slightly above six figures though, which I will reach soon, so I'm currently a bit unsure on how to progress career wise.
  - jethro_tell 4y ago
    You can just add an ops guy with minimal coding to a dev team and it works wonders. Ops guy does the ops stuff, writes the shell scrips and consults with the devs on how to build what they need to build. The ops guy has an opportunity to level up his coding since the devs are doing code reviews for him and devs have an opportunity level up their ops knowledge because they are working with someone who understands what hand how platform should be built.
bamboozled 4y ago
I agree, I'm lucky that in my career I've been exposed so many different disciplines of Network and Linux administration that I know (mostly) what "the cloud" is made of. So when problems do occur, I can make some pretty good guesses on what's wrong before I actually know for sure.

wjnc 4y ago

I see this in my firm. Non-IT management loves to resort to the lowest denominator of 'systems', that is - systems built by people who are not trained as administrators nor experienced, but mainly follow online guides /and deliver/ (at p50). When I mention the resilience of the systems we maintain to senior directors the most common reply is that 1. the activities are not production and 2. the cost of letting our proper IT-departments handle things go way beyond the willingness to pay. When I reply that our non-production activities are still unmissable for anything more than a few days (which defines it as production for me, but not in our IT-risk landscape) I usually get greeted with something along the lines that in all things cloud all is different. For non-techies I think it's just hard to phantom that most of the effort in maintaining systems is in resilience, not in the just scripting it to work repeatedly.

amtamt 4y ago
So many people somehow believe a single VM with no disk snapshot/ back-up, having a floating IP, running ad hoc scripts to bring up production workload is "production quality", only because it is running in cloud.
Fiahil 4y ago
They most likely resorted to skipping IT involvement because the department is difficult to work with. "The cloud" is both a technical solution for flexible workload requirements, and a political solution to allow others to continue delivering when IT is quoting them 3 months of "prep work" for setting up a dev environment and 2 to 4 weeks for a single SSL certificate. As a consultant, I am confronted to hostile IT requirements daily. Oftentimes, departments hiring us end up setting and training their own Ops teams outside of IT. despite leading to incredible redundancy, that's often credited as a huge success for that department, because of the gained flexibility.

jbotdev 4y ago

I think nowadays requiring that all application developers should also do ops (DevOps?) is a bad idea. Sure they should have basic shell skills, but when you’re on Kubernetes or similar, understanding what’s underneath is not vital. Instead, rely on specialized teams that actually want to know this stuff, and become the experts you escalate to only when things really go sideways and the abstractions fail (which is rare if you do it well). If your budget is too small for this, there are always support contracts. As someone who’s been hiring for both sides, I see this reflected in candidates more and more. The good devs rarely know ops, and the good ops rarely code well. For our “platform” teams, we end up just hiring good devs and teaching them ops. I think the people that are really good at both often end up working at the actual cloud providers or DevOps startups.

blinkingled 4y ago
But then there's the problem that now you have two teams - ops team doesn't understand the app and app team doesn't understand the ops/infra side. I of course agree with your point that there should be two teams but you need a few guys who understand both app dev and ops/infra/OSes/k8s internals etc. And finding these people has been nearly impossible.
- MaKey 4y ago
  I am one of those rare people :) Coming from the Linux sysadmin and networking side I'm currently working on going deeper into programming and expanding my knowledge there. In Europe the pay for someone like me appears to be capped at slightly above six figures though, which I will reach soon, so I'm currently a bit unsure on how to progress career wise.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  You can just add an ops guy with minimal coding to a dev team and it works wonders. Ops guy does the ops stuff, writes the shell scrips and consults with the devs on how to build what they need to build. The ops guy has an opportunity to level up his coding since the devs are doing code reviews for him and devs have an opportunity level up their ops knowledge because they are working with someone who understands what hand how platform should be built.

bamboozled 4y ago

I agree, I'm lucky that in my career I've been exposed so many different disciplines of Network and Linux administration that I know (mostly) what "the cloud" is made of. So when problems do occur, I can make some pretty good guesses on what's wrong before I actually know for sure.