A Google engineer has suggested that we are doing too much of the work that machines should do and by that possibly sounded the death knell for a long standing role within the IT department, the systems administrator.
Todd Underwood is a site reliability engineer with Google. Speaking at a Usenix Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference, Underwood said that the balance of scalability and costs is a key focus area for Google.
“Add a million users, you really have to add less than a 1,000 quanta of whatever expense you are incurring,” said Underwood. A “quanta” of expense could be people’s time, compute resources, or power, he added.
Now that’s a pretty high ratio, 1,000,000 new users supported by 1,000 quanta of resources.
But Underwood went on to specify further that orchestration and automation needs to go further.
“We’re doing too much of the machines’ work for them,” he said.
Underwood argued that, ideally, an organisation should get rid of its system administration altogether, and just build and innovate on existing services offered by others.
Now, to a certain extent one could counter this by saying well he would say that wouldn’t he, but let’s examine the assertion for a moment.
With the advent of the software define data centre, that effectively pools compute, networking and storage resources, what does a sysadmin do? With higher levels of automation and orchestration, leading to not only software defined but virtually autonomic data centres, is a sysadmin going to go the way of the airline pilot in the old joke?*
One could argue that even the smartest systems still need to monitored by a human who understands the overall context of performance and practicality to ensure that the systems can be tweaked as necessary and reported upon intelligently. But again, analytics are developing to the point where even this might be unnecessary as the information can be presented to a CFO or business unit manager who can then decide whether changes are necessary.
Now Underwood did qualify his remarks by saying that a world without sysadmins is not yet possible, but it is certainly something that is not only conceivable, but may soon be feasible.
It may be time to look to expand ones skills base, if you’re current card says systems administrator. I hear data scientist is a good punt.
* A pilot is being show the latest development in flight automation. He is brought into the cockpit of a new aircraft where there is a man sitting in a chair, with no visible flight controls, in front of a bank of complicated displays. There is a large guard dog sitting between the man and the screens.
The engineer explains that the plane is totally automated.
“Well, what is the man there for, is he the pilot?”
“No, not at all, he is there to feed the dog.”
“And what is the dog for?”
“He is there to bite the man if he tries to touch anything.”
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