The Future of System Administration

My job currently is to manage infrastructure systems; in other words it is technical lead for system administrators. System administrators as listed in Wikipedia are:
▪ Analyzing system logs and identifying potential issues with computer systems.
▪ Performing routine audits of systems and software.
▪ Performing backups.
▪ Applying operating system updates, patches, and configuration changes.
▪ Installing and configuring new hardware and software.
▪ Responsibility for documenting the configuration of the system.
▪ Troubleshooting any reported problems.
▪ System performance tuning.
For most of those tasks system administrators try to automate any task that will be repeated more than once, for that scripting skills is needed in daily administrators job. Once a colleague of mine told me “Good system administrator watches movies and play games all the time”, and I believe he is right. System administrators should learn programing languages like Perl and shell scripting to be able to survive in the coming future, it’s not that they have to become developers, they have to get used to the tools that will be used in the future and develop their own.
“We’re being introduced to another paradigm of system administration: framework-based configuration management” (Matt Simmons) and as Matt Simmons said configuration management packages offers time saving abilities in addition to centralized management.
System administrator position in ten years will not be similar to the current one or will be more in maintaining configuration management packages and try to automate things more if not yet automated.
In ten years system administrators will turn into system designers and system architects, some of the handy tasks like hardware installation and maintenance will be outsourced, configuration management packages will take care of the daily tasks like monitoring, resolve and fix the reported problems. Tasks like maintaining user accounts will be system support task.
Mainly getting trained to configuration management tools, scripting and management skills will be the required skill set for the future system administrators.



References:

System Administrator, Available on “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator” (Accessed on January 1, 2011).
Matt Simmons, The Future of system Administration, Available on http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2009/08/the-future-of-system-administration/ (Accessed on January 1, 2011)