I AM SYSADMIN (AND SO CAN YOU!) Friday, November 14, 14

Transcription

1 I AM SYSADMIN (AND SO CAN YOU!)

2 April 2014

3 Musings: Rick Farrow Like Elizabeth Zwicky writes in this issue, I am not a system administrator. Oh, I can still fake it, by managing my own systems (DNS, SMTP, DHCP, and HTTP) and occasionally even consulting locally. But I gave up on being a sysadmin when I found out that I wasn t very interested in a very important aspect of it: building scripts and systems to automate the work that needed to be done routinely.

4 The Death of System Administration Todd Underwood We are in the final days of system administration.

5 How to Be a Better System Administrator and Then Something Else Elizabeth Zwicky I once was a system administrator. Now I m not.

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7 With these skills: You can enable:

8 Stigma? SysAdmin s apparent are: Grumpy grey-beards & BOFH Stuck in the dragon-slayer past & epic story tellers Tape Swappers who love nonautomatable repetitive tasks Unable and/or Unwilling to code A junior level person that may become more one day

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10 Contributing Factors Automate yourself out of a job & Keep it up are the oldest SA axiom, but tools to do this were poor, complex, or inefficient in the past We used products as designed We were (sometimes) trained by the vendor & utilized vendor support There was a right way and wrong way The server room was a walled garden, and we were the gardeners

11 Increasingly, these aren t true anymore.

12 What SA s Do System Admins: Build and maintain systems to facilitate the needs of a group of users (directly or indirectly) Support the users of the system to efficiently accomplish tasks

13 Word Games No-Ops Post-Ops DevOps SRE These are philosophies of operation.

14 Stop the insanity!

15 What they mean Cloud changes everything Most of the world is software defined, and software is malleable Automate all the things Write more code (software solves every problem) Every company should be as l337 as Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.

16 Why didn t I think of that?

17 The Dev Reality Devs Aren t Helpless Anymore Services are the new Libraries (Dep Management) Ops can not bottleneck development anymore

18 The Ops Reality Most shops consist of 3 or less admins Daily stresses make project work nearly impossible (not enough time) Frequently IT & Ops are lumped together Ops technology moves simultaneously too fast and too slow (eg: Nagios & Ansible)

19 The Dilemma Yes, Cloud changes the game. Yes, Software is more important than ever. Yes, I need to more with less and get out of developers way But, who builds the cloud(s)? But, who runs the cloud(s)? But, how do I keep up with the technology?

20 SysAdmin isn t Dying. It is Evolving.

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22 Why So Hard? SA s are expected to not just operate the business but to also build the systems used to operate the business

23 Requirements for Change Freedom to innovate and evolve means embracing failure and learning... which means culture & management maters! Acquiring the skills takes time... which means support & education are important! Give us an environment in which we can evolve.

24 So how do we do that?

25 Divide & Conquer If you have legacy, make a concerted effort to eliminate it Adopt SaaS where you can Use the public clouds where you can Build & Run internal clouds (*aas)

26 Development & Deployment are changing Vagrant is awesome (IaaS Model on a laptop) Docker is awesome (Repeatable Laptop to Production App Container) Config Management isn t just for Ops Self-Service Infrastructure is a signup away (Cloud)

27 Small is the new Big Micro-Services (neo-soa) & Distributed Architectures are awesome, particularly when containerized New Essential skills: RESTful APIs (curl & OO Ninja) Message Queues (RabbitMQ) Service Coordination & Discovery (ZooKeeper/etcd & Consul)

28 PERL & PHP I have seen PERL6... its Ruby Python & Ruby should be the standard languages of the admin today Go is the language for Ops Everyone should know a little JavaScript & how to use Node.js BASH & AWK still rule though

29 APIs are the new CLI

30 HTML has changed Update on HTML5 & CSS3 Basics Try out client-side frameworks (Angular) Try out Node.js for back-end services

31 Metrics! Lots of great SaaS solutions: Circonus, Librato, DataDog, etc. Graphite is the go-to solution Watch this space!

32 Logging Splunk is still great JSON logging formats are here to stay ELK is... high maintenance, but neat Logstash is your swiss army knife Great SaaS solutions available:... but just use Sumologic

33 Discover KV Stores NoSQL makes little sense from a nonprogramatic viewpoint Play with MongoDB or LevelDB from JavaScript (Node.js) Discover the joy of caching with Redis!

34 Git Learn Git... Learn Git better (Lynda.com) Use Github without shame!

35 Continuous Integration Play with Jenkins! (Its not as magical or complicated as you might think) Check out Travis for Github (travis-ci.org)

36 Standardization Document procedures... then automate it down to a single step... then remove that step You can t improve what you don t understand Iterate from current-state to future-state

37 Compliance Basics Know what controls, policy, and procedures are and how they fit together Learn about information classification (FIPS 199) Know the risk assessment basics (NIST SP )

38 Be a Leader Share knowledge Take the initiative Make the time to improve yourself & your infrastructure Empower your colleagues across the organization

39 Don t be a hater Encourage peers to try new things! Share successes! Embrace failure and learn together! Assholes kill innovation Try & Appreciate everything

40 Sites that can help Ops School (opsschool.org) Lynda.com Pluralsight.com SafariBooksOnline.com CodeSchool.com Ask questions on Google Watch presentations on YouTube & Vimeo

41 $SYSTEM admin for life. Ben