Comments on: Cloud computing is a sea change - How sysadmins can prepare

By: Cloudy Weather - My World is Changing – David Mostardi

Cloudy Weather - My World is Changing – David Mostardi — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:59:01 +0000

[...] Mayo has written an excellent piece on the coming sea change and how sysadmins can prepare. Words to keep one’s job [...]

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:18:01 +0000

As a long time manager of sysadmins, network admins, project managers and systems operators, this is already starting to happen. While we have had to maintain Production sites in the ‘traditional’ sense (presentation, app/integration, database/storage tiers, content switched, load balanced, firewalled and made fully failover+redundant) we’ve seen tightness around our development, QA/staging and DR sites; to the point that those platforms are all virtualized today (VMWare, HyperV, etc.) Hardware has become cheap to the point that buying a few big boxes and slicing and dicing the environment in to virtual hosts and firing up new clusters for more rapid application development means the focus has turned away from “grunt” work to “sophisticated” work where we collaborate with the application developers to help group and align services so that they scale the best, especially if we have to interface with CICS transactions written (and still written) in Cobol sitting on an IBM mainframe.

Gone are the days of gushing and oh-wowing over the latest pieces of gadgetry to come on to the loading dock. Its all about application performance and secure integration and orchestrations - all that need the kind of analytical smarts and broad vision that BOFHs have always had.

By: mark

mark — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:37:52 +0000

There are edge cases, yes. Primarily, the people who actually build these “cloud” infrastructures. Which includes people who build and implement CDNs (Akamai, Amazon’s new CDN), core internet infrastructure (DNS, actual IP transport), etc.

BTW some of the cloud offerings are indeed already geographically distributed - Amazon lets you pick from several “availability zones”. Even at Joyent we let people choose which coast they want to fire up Accelerators on, and we partner for CDN services so customers can automatically get their assets closer to customers. I happen to think the ability to offer geographic distribution is one of the main factors (on top of the ones I laid out above) supporting my view that the Cloud/IaaS space will increasingly be dominated by a handful of very large players. Smaller shops just can’t afford the capex layout and legal costs of running datacenters around the world. But as the Net grows to every corner of the world, pushing your app as close to all those corners as possible becomes more and more important.

Interesting times ahead, for sure.

By: Matt Pounsett

Matt Pounsett — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:20:48 +0000

The cloud implementations I’m aware of are still being implemented as big, centralized data centres. If I’m wrong on that please let me know. I think you’re right about the implications to the average sysadmin, but there are edge cases where this doesn’t, and can’t, replace the bare metal. I’m thinking in particular of applications that require broad physical and/or topological diversity like DNS infrastructure and content delivery. Think root/TLD DNS servers or outfits like Akamai. Until the cloud is everywhere, and topological location is one of the radio buttons in the VM config, I don’t see the current sysadmin/SI paradigm going away completely.. just getting really, really small.

By: Weekly Digest, 11-30-08 - almost effortless

Weekly Digest, 11-30-08 - almost effortless — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:45:45 +0000

[...] Cloud computing is a sea change How sysadmins can prepare …don’t be shy, embrace the cloud. If you’re a UNIX sysadmin you already have the right stuff to succeed in this new world of utility on-demand computing… [...]

By: The future is cloudy | Bootup Labs Blog

The future is cloudy | Bootup Labs Blog — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:31:21 +0000

[...] folks covering related ideas include Mark Mayo, who writes about the changing role / skillset of sysadmins. Tim Bray’s Tough Times series covers infrastructure in part. Zero Cloud Lockin is having a [...]

By: Trevor O

Trevor O — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:56:28 +0000

I especially agree about the technologies that people need to start learning. Too many sysadmins I’ve met are hung up on getting another 512kbps of throughput out of their servers. That kind of detail oriented tweaking is great, but it doesn’t matter when you can get 10 more servers for the equivalent of one hour of work.

Distributed Distributed Distributed (I’m the new Jumping Ballmer)

PS. Time to start the Plan9 Vancouver User Group. There will be at least 2 people. Ha.