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I don't know about sysadmin work, but I'm pretty sure DevOps could be. I worked at a company that ended up spending probably several man-years worth of effort

by mtrimpe 14y ago

I don't know about sysadmin work, but I'm pretty sure DevOps could be. I worked at a company that ended up spending probably several man-years worth of effort over a period of three years on puppetizing their environment and still doesn't have a one-click-deploy of their infrastructure and feels the pain of that acutely every few months when a new environment needs to be brought up by hand. If someone'd been around offering 30, 50 or even 100k no-cure-no-pay work to get their environment into a one-click-deployable state in under a month or so I'm pretty sure I could've sold that internally at several occasions.

semanticist 14y ago
I think this is the key - selling yourself as a 'sysadmin' is like calling yourself a 'programmer' - it's a commodity. Instead you're a site scaling engineer, or a cloud automation specialist, whatever sounds like it'll solve the client's problems - which these days are frequently that a bunch of developers set up the production environment on the fly and it just about works but isn't reliable or convenient. I think the future for sysadmin work is definitely 'DevOps' - and it's not really that much different from old school sysadmin. Yeah a pure Chef/Puppet-managed system is more like writing code than hacking away, but behind it all it's the same kind of work. It is definitely possible to bill US$2k per week or more as a contract sysadmin, but trolling through Craig's List isn't the way to manage it!
bartz_daniel 14y ago
Would love to know more about the remaining challenges to get closer of a one-clid-deployement after such a puppetizing effort. Could you share some of the most important issues (technical or not) ? In advance many thanks. I am really curious about your experience as we try to achieve the same objectives here with http://comodit.com http://comodit.com

by mtrimpe 14y ago

semanticist 14y ago

I think this is the key - selling yourself as a 'sysadmin' is like calling yourself a 'programmer' - it's a commodity. Instead you're a site scaling engineer, or a cloud automation specialist, whatever sounds like it'll solve the client's problems - which these days are frequently that a bunch of developers set up the production environment on the fly and it just about works but isn't reliable or convenient. I think the future for sysadmin work is definitely 'DevOps' - and it's not really that much different from old school sysadmin. Yeah a pure Chef/Puppet-managed system is more like writing code than hacking away, but behind it all it's the same kind of work. It is definitely possible to bill US$2k per week or more as a contract sysadmin, but trolling through Craig's List isn't the way to manage it!

bartz_daniel 14y ago

Would love to know more about the remaining challenges to get closer of a one-clid-deployement after such a puppetizing effort. Could you share some of the most important issues (technical or not) ? In advance many thanks. I am really curious about your experience as we try to achieve the same objectives here with http://comodit.com http://comodit.com