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Servers: SysAdmins, Public 'Clouds' and Cautionary Tales

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Server
  • Do I need a college degree to be a sysadmin?

    If we could answer that question with a simple "yes" or "no," this would not be much of a story. Reality is a little more nuanced, though. An accurate answer begins with one of "Yes, but…" or "No, but…"—and the answer depends on who you ask, among other important variables, including industry, company size, and so forth.

    On the "yes" front, IT job descriptions don’t typically buck the "degree required" assumption, sysadmin roles included. This fact is perhaps especially true in the corporate business world across a wide range of sectors, and it isn’t limited to large companies, either. Consider a recent opening posted on the jobs site Indeed.com for an IT system administrator position at Crest Foods, a 650-person food manufacturing company in Ashton, Ill. The description includes plenty of familiar requirements for a sysadmin. The first bullet point under "Desired Education & Experience" reads: "Bachelor’s degree in computer science, networking, IT, or relevant field."

    "Generally, systems administrators will have [degrees] from four-year universities," says Jim Johnson, district president at the recruiting firm Robert Half Technology. While some employers don’t specify a particular degree field, Johnson notes the bachelor’s in computer information systems (CIS) as a good fit for the sysadmin field and overlapping IT roles.

    That said, Johnson also points out that there are other options out there for people that don’t pursue a traditional degree path. That’s especially true given the growth of online education and training, as well as in-person opportunities such as technical schools.

    "There are [sysadmins] with computer systems professional or computer operator certificates from technical or online schools," Johnson says.

    Moreover, a potential employer’s "desired" educational background can be just that: An ideal scenario, but not a dealbreaker. This fact can be true even if a degree is listed as "required," perhaps especially in markets with a tight supply of qualified candidates. If you’ve got the technical chops, a degree might become much more optional than a job description might lead you to believe.

  • Resource scarcity in Public Clouds

    In addition to this, there are some “special” moments, such as Thanksgiving and the nearby days that, by now, have become a widespread event even beyond the countries where they used to be celebrated. Probably, in the data-centers in areas where those festivities are celebrated (or at least where the capitalistic part of the celebration is celebrated), the load reaches the annual peak, due to the e-commerce websites.

    To make the situation even worst, many Cloud customers are rewriting and improving their applications, making them more cloud-native. Now, you’ll wonder how cloud-native applications can make things worse? The reason is very simple: the cloud-native applications scale. This means that during the off-peak season the applications will drastically reduce their footprint, creating the false feeling of resource abundancy.

    This situation creates some problems, in my opinion.

    First of all, since it’s very hard for the Public Cloud provider to estimate the load - and in the future, it will be even harder - we will have to live with frequent resource exhaustion in public clouds, which will make a single-cloud single-region application fragile. This will be true, not even considering the economic aspect of the problem. There will be situations where it will not be economically convenient for the Cloud Provider to provision enough resources to manage the peaks since the additional provisioning cost would not be repaid during the short periods those resources will be used.

  • Notice: Linode Classic Manager Users

    Our legacy Linode Manager will be decommissioned on January 31, 2020. After that time, you will be automatically redirected to the Cloud Manager when logging in to manage your infrastructure on Linode.

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