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AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. With AWS, you don't have to stand up and maintain an entire layer of infrastructure management tools; all you

by exelius 12y ago

AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. With AWS, you don't have to stand up and maintain an entire layer of infrastructure management tools; all you really have is config management. You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, ESPECIALLY when you're in that "in-between" phase where you're starting to build out a tech ops organization. You don't have those step functions where you have a huge need for some vendor-specific technology knowledge, but not enough work to justify a full time employee. AWS provides an abstraction layer that you need to have anyway: the difference is that you don't have to BUILD that layer, it was there from day one.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. I have yet to find an AWS Infrastructure Admin job for under $120K/year (SF, LA, CHI, Boston, NY were the locales I looked in). I have seen quite a few traditional sysadmin jobs under $100K/year. > You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, This has traditionally been true of Linux admins in general. I'm not seeing that much of a difference in the marketplace between Linux admin and AWS admin compensation packages at the moment, except AWS admin positions are usually offered by startups and included equity you wouldn't get at a typical enterprise position. Disclaimer: I do DevOps/AWS/Infrastructure/Etc.
- exelius 12y ago
  Yeah, I started out my career as a system admin and the AWS infrastructure stuff always made me fear my job was going to disappear. In reality, it's just made people aware that the skillset most system admins have were closer to those of a software developer anyway. As everything moves to the DevOps model, I find that under DevOps, "AWS Admin" as a job goes away, and your developers all just know a lot about more about AWS since that's part of the underlying stack. AWS is a lot easier for developers to conceptualize as well - they're just logical objects that can be created/destroyed like programmatic objects can. Used to be that if you needed a new server, you'd have to talk to your sysadmin and get a VM provisioned, keys issued, etc. but with AWS all you have to do is issue a method to a class in your framework of choice (since AWS has SDK libraries for most languages/frameworks), and the VM is created, provisioned and integrated into your application like no work needed to happen.
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by exelius 12y ago

toomuchtodo 12y ago

> AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. I have yet to find an AWS Infrastructure Admin job for under $120K/year (SF, LA, CHI, Boston, NY were the locales I looked in). I have seen quite a few traditional sysadmin jobs under $100K/year. > You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, This has traditionally been true of Linux admins in general. I'm not seeing that much of a difference in the marketplace between Linux admin and AWS admin compensation packages at the moment, except AWS admin positions are usually offered by startups and included equity you wouldn't get at a typical enterprise position. Disclaimer: I do DevOps/AWS/Infrastructure/Etc.

exelius 12y ago
Yeah, I started out my career as a system admin and the AWS infrastructure stuff always made me fear my job was going to disappear. In reality, it's just made people aware that the skillset most system admins have were closer to those of a software developer anyway. As everything moves to the DevOps model, I find that under DevOps, "AWS Admin" as a job goes away, and your developers all just know a lot about more about AWS since that's part of the underlying stack. AWS is a lot easier for developers to conceptualize as well - they're just logical objects that can be created/destroyed like programmatic objects can. Used to be that if you needed a new server, you'd have to talk to your sysadmin and get a VM provisioned, keys issued, etc. but with AWS all you have to do is issue a method to a class in your framework of choice (since AWS has SDK libraries for most languages/frameworks), and the VM is created, provisioned and integrated into your application like no work needed to happen.
- deleted 12y ago
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