Oppugn.us

I can't help but grin each time I run across a developer posting about the coming extinction of the systems administrator, who will be done in by the noxious vapors of "the cloud" and the clever devs who, armed with miraculous management software, are finally free to launch their beautiful code into the aether. Some in the sysadmin profession, like myself, might find this notion insulting and, perhaps, threatening. I, however, think these ideas are hilarious and I wholeheartedly encourage every developer who harbors these thoughts to fly free from oppressors such as myself. In my experience, 90% of devs barely understand HTTP, much less how to configure Apache, don't know what an open-relay is and couldn't spell LDAP if their life depended on it. Go ahead and abandon the folks who have spent years honing their knowledge of systems management and it won't take long before hubris has reared it's ugly head in the form of rooted EC2 instances and an uptick in the volume of spam flowing through the internets.

Its worth noting that the Puppet project was founded by a sysadmin and that the primary audience for the software has always been other admins, who aren't all as myopic and territorial as the cliche of the BOFH would have us believe. I've known some devs who could qualify as Unix experts, had read all of the relevant RFCs and needed very little help from folks like me. I've met many more, however, who didn't have the time or inclination to learn the intricacies of configuring Sendmail and would rather have someone else do it. Not everyone can be a programming or operations expert and even fewer can do both.