The epic about system administrators as an endangered species
System administrators around the world, congratulations on your professional holiday!
We have no system administrators left (well, almost). However, the tradition of them is still fresh. In honor of the holiday, we have prepared this epic. Sit back, dear readers.
Once upon a time, the world of Dodo IS was on fire. At that time, the main task of our system administrators was to survive another day and not cry.
')
Once upon a time, programmers wrote code a little and slowly, and laid it out on prod only once a week. So the problems arose only once every seven days. But then they began to write more code and spread it more often, problems began to increase, sometimes everything began to fall apart, and rollback became worse. System administrators suffered, but suffered this booth.
They sat at home in the evenings with anxiety in their hearts. And every time it happened, “it never was, and again monitoring sends a signal for help: Dude, the world is on fire!”. Then our system administrators put on their red raincoats, panties over leggings, made curls on their foreheads and flew to save the Dodo world.
Attention, a little explanation. The classic system administrators who serve the hardware in Dodo IS never been. We immediately had Azure advanced in the clouds.
What did they do:
The life of the team of infrastructure engineers (as we called our system administrators) then consisted of extinguishing fires and ever-breaking test benches. They lived and grieve, and then decided to think: what is so bad, maybe we can do better? For example, we will not divide people into programmers and system administrators?
Given: there is a system administrator who has servers in the zone of responsibility, a network that connects it to other servers, infrastructure-level programs (the web server that hosts the application, a database management system, etc.). And there is a programmer whose responsibility is working code.
And there are things that are at the junction. Whose responsibility is this?
Usually just at this junction our system administrators and programmers met and it began:
- Dudes, nothing works, probably because of the infrastructure.
“Dudes, no, the thing is code.”
Once at that moment a fence began to grow between them, through which they joyfully threw poop. The task, like a poop, was thrown from one side of the fence to the other. In this case, no one came close to resolving the situation. Sad smile.
A ray of sunshine pierced a cloudy sky, when several years ago Google came up with the idea of ​​not doing things, but instead doing a common thing.
In 2016, Google released a booklet “Site Reliability Engineering” about transforming the role of a system administrator: from the Master of Magic to a formalized engineering approach to using software and automation. They themselves went through all the thorns and obstacles, got the hang of it and decided to share this with the world. The book is in the public domain here .
The book contains simple truths:
These practices were read by our Gleb ( entropy ), and away we go. We are introducing! We are now in a transitional phase. The SRE team has been formed (there are 6 ready-made specialists, 6 more are onboarding) and is ready to change the world completely consisting of code for the better.
We create our infrastructure in such a way as to enable developers to fully manage their environments and engage in collaboration with SRE.
System administrator is a worthy profession. But knowledge of the system part also requires excellent software engineering skills.
Systems are becoming simpler and simpler, and super-unique knowledge of administering iron servers every year is becoming less popular. Cloud technology is crowding out the need for this knowledge.
A good system administrator in the near future will have to have good software engineering skills. Better yet, he has good skills in this area.
No one knows how to predict the future until it comes, but we believe that over time there will be fewer and fewer companies that want to increase the infinitely inflated staff of system administrators. Although, of course, lovers will remain. Few today ride horses, mostly use cars, although there are lovers ...
All with a day sysadmin, all the code!
We have no system administrators left (well, almost). However, the tradition of them is still fresh. In honor of the holiday, we have prepared this epic. Sit back, dear readers.
Once upon a time, the world of Dodo IS was on fire. At that time, the main task of our system administrators was to survive another day and not cry.
')
Once upon a time, programmers wrote code a little and slowly, and laid it out on prod only once a week. So the problems arose only once every seven days. But then they began to write more code and spread it more often, problems began to increase, sometimes everything began to fall apart, and rollback became worse. System administrators suffered, but suffered this booth.
They sat at home in the evenings with anxiety in their hearts. And every time it happened, “it never was, and again monitoring sends a signal for help: Dude, the world is on fire!”. Then our system administrators put on their red raincoats, panties over leggings, made curls on their foreheads and flew to save the Dodo world.
Attention, a little explanation. The classic system administrators who serve the hardware in Dodo IS never been. We immediately had Azure advanced in the clouds.
What did they do:
- if something breaks, we make it so that it is repaired;
- juggled with servers at the expert level;
- Responsible for the virtual network in Azure
- responsible for low-level things, for example, interactions of components (* in a whisper * in which sometimes they didn’t rummage nichrome);
- server reconnects;
- and many other wild ones.
The life of the team of infrastructure engineers (as we called our system administrators) then consisted of extinguishing fires and ever-breaking test benches. They lived and grieve, and then decided to think: what is so bad, maybe we can do better? For example, we will not divide people into programmers and system administrators?
Task
Given: there is a system administrator who has servers in the zone of responsibility, a network that connects it to other servers, infrastructure-level programs (the web server that hosts the application, a database management system, etc.). And there is a programmer whose responsibility is working code.
And there are things that are at the junction. Whose responsibility is this?
Usually just at this junction our system administrators and programmers met and it began:
- Dudes, nothing works, probably because of the infrastructure.
“Dudes, no, the thing is code.”
Once at that moment a fence began to grow between them, through which they joyfully threw poop. The task, like a poop, was thrown from one side of the fence to the other. In this case, no one came close to resolving the situation. Sad smile.
A ray of sunshine pierced a cloudy sky, when several years ago Google came up with the idea of ​​not doing things, but instead doing a common thing.
But what if you describe everything as code?
In 2016, Google released a booklet “Site Reliability Engineering” about transforming the role of a system administrator: from the Master of Magic to a formalized engineering approach to using software and automation. They themselves went through all the thorns and obstacles, got the hang of it and decided to share this with the world. The book is in the public domain here .
The book contains simple truths:
- doing everything as code is good;
- using an engineering approach is good;
- doing good monitoring is good;
- stopping the service from being released if it has no clear logging and monitoring is also good.
These practices were read by our Gleb ( entropy ), and away we go. We are introducing! We are now in a transitional phase. The SRE team has been formed (there are 6 ready-made specialists, 6 more are onboarding) and is ready to change the world completely consisting of code for the better.
We create our infrastructure in such a way as to enable developers to fully manage their environments and engage in collaboration with SRE.
Vangem instead of conclusions
System administrator is a worthy profession. But knowledge of the system part also requires excellent software engineering skills.
Systems are becoming simpler and simpler, and super-unique knowledge of administering iron servers every year is becoming less popular. Cloud technology is crowding out the need for this knowledge.
A good system administrator in the near future will have to have good software engineering skills. Better yet, he has good skills in this area.
No one knows how to predict the future until it comes, but we believe that over time there will be fewer and fewer companies that want to increase the infinitely inflated staff of system administrators. Although, of course, lovers will remain. Few today ride horses, mostly use cars, although there are lovers ...
All with a day sysadmin, all the code!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/461447/
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