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...