SysAdmins are Dead — Long Live SysAdmins!

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/via https://xkcd.com/705/
One of the side-effects of the DevOps craze is the refrain that SysAdmins are no longer relevant, that the world of Container Orchestrations (and Continuous Delivery! and Serverless!) make Operations a thing of the past.
Lets play with this for a moment. Take a look at your environment — your DevOps-fu is strong, you have the ultimate in Continuous Delivery, and whenever you merge into master, stuff ends up in Production.
Cool, isn’t it?
A little twist here though, turns out that you’ve got a bunch of assets that are best served from a CDN (Cloudflare perhaps). Which leads to a whole thicket of issues — 
• Who gets to decide whether the changes you want to make to it are viable?
• What if those changes conflict with somebody else’s needs?
• What happens if that other team has a problem — do they call you?
• Heck, what if you want to switch to CloudFront?
There are all sorts of ways you can deal with this — policies, roles, and whatnot, but the easy solution, and one that you will eventually end up gravitating to, is to designate a team that is responsible for all CDN related activities. Oh, it might be your team, or someone else’s team, but regardless, the rule will be that “All Things CDN Go Through Team XXX”.
Which is great right up to the time that you start thinking about your DNS services, at which point you add a rule saying ““All Things DNS Go Through Team YYY”.
And then one for your K-V store.
And proxy services.
And SSL certificates, Postgres, GAFYD, firewalls…..
Somewhere along the way, you also figure out that these cross-cuts are taking quiet a bit of time from teams XXX, YYY, etc., and you end up with a team that just focuses on these cross-cuts. Congratulations, you just rediscovered SysAdmins!
Oh, you might call it Operations, or Infrastructure, or some such, but the point here is that you (re-)discovered the underlying context behind why SysAdminsexisted. Oh, the underlying tools and technologies have changed, but hey, that’s true of pretty much everything out there (except emacs). In the end though, somebody needs to be responsible for the cross-cuts, for legacy systems and software, and for all the things that tend to fall between organizational cracks in our brave new world.
In short, meet the new world of SysAdmins, which is suspiciously like the old world of SysAdmins!
(This article also appears on my blog)

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