Welcome to first installment of The Accidental Sysadmin, a column for people on the front lines of IT who are still wondering how they got there. Because I share an office with this guy, I have been hearing a lot about the death of the sysadmin. This isn’t what it sounds like. It wasn’t Colonel Mustard in the server room with the cable crimper.  There are no overworked nerds combusting from sheer stress.  I’m talking about the demise of sysadmin as a job title. Actually, I’m quite sure that there are overworked nerds combusting from sheer stress, but that’s not what I’m on about here.  Whether you call your sysadmin a computer systems administrator, the IT guy, some flavour of “engineer” or even an “architect”, the jobs are under threat.  Technology is evolving, demands are changing, and this is changing the nature of systems administration. Corporate IT is getting easier to administer. No seriously, stop laughing for a minute. It is. IT administration is still frustrating and labor-intensive, but it is no longer the sort of job that only a highly-trained, expensively-accredited Mensa member with advanced skills in black magic can perform. Advances in hardware mean that businesses who formerly needed their own data center can make do with a half-rack of hyperconverged gear shoved in the corner of any room with decent air conditioning.  Businesses who never needed a data center in the first place may have simply done away with most of their equipment and turned to various public cloud services for their compute, storage, applications, and analytics. As my office-mate wrote, “These tools make it easy for a handful of half-way competent generalists to accomplish what once required teams of specialists.” That’s me: the halfway competent generalist. Don’t you work at a computer...

The DevOps movement has a dirty little secret it doesn’t want anyone talking about.  DevOps isn’t about making you money, or making your life easier.  DevOps is about making vendors and consultants money.  If you’re lucky and wise you will be able to choose good partners who, in the course of enriching themselves also make your business significantly more efficient.  But how to narrow the playing field? The most important thing to do is ask “where does the money go”?  Anyone banging on about an IT industry buzzword wants your money.  The question is how much do they want and what are they proposing to give you for it? In almost every case you don’t need a consultant to get to DevOps.  I can tell you the secret sauce of their advice right here: DevOps is hard to implement.  This is not because the tools are difficult, the theory is complicated or the value vague and nebulous. DevOps is hard to implement because it means radical change for many people, many of whom cannot easily see how or why they will still be employed after the process is completed.  Fear, and a very human resistance to change are what stand in the way of “implementing DevOps culture”. No consultant can change that.  No consultant can do anything to ease people through the process or soothe their fears.  Management of the business in question need to recognize the fears of the technologists they employ, engage with them, and provide assurances that everything will be all right once the dust settles. No consultant can do that for management.  The best they can do is spend their time trying to serve as a translation layer: explaining to management why the tech staff are reluctant, and explaining to...