TL;DR: Was offered a job. Sysadmin of company don't have root rights because of managed hosting. I declined, but still this raises many questions for me. See questions.
So, I was recently offered a job as a linux sysadmin on a medium sized company. They are relying on Tomcat, nginx and Apache. They do have an impressive continuous integration and continuous delivery automation level and are working on continuous deployment. (For an explanation of the difference, click here.) The company has managed hosting only and just tells it provider "We need another frontend/app/database server with X, Y, Z" and they will provide it, already pre-configured. This is also true for the Ansible/GitLab/Jenkins servers. The sysadmins are mainly maintaining the Ansible codebase, do the not-yet automated lifecycle tasks (updates, etc.) and emergency fixing when something goes down. They told me: None of our sysadmins has root-rights. I asked if that was because of security reasons, they denied. The simple reason is that they don't need them. The managed hosting provider won't give them root access (for obvious reasons, sure) and for the rest they don't need it. They have a "sysadmin" user on any system who can read/modify all their files and that's it.
I was a little bit worried by this, as it made the job feel more like an "Ops-Job". At my current job, even if I'm having root rights onto a server, I'm still not managing every aspect of it. Applications are managed by operators and/or developers. So the offered position would've just put me on the other end. So for me it felt like: Only keep things running. Don't invent or build new stuff. No inventive-creative solutions (This is what I like the most at my current job). Only use ready-to-build fabricated bricks to build the same house over and over again.
I declined that offer. Mainly because the pay was beneath my current wage. But still.. This interview gave me a lot to think, and I haven't found answers to all questions.
Will IT/being a sysadmin more and more about "just putting bricks together"? With the ongoing spread of virtualization, containers, configuration management, etc. we do have easy to use bricks. But still these bricks need to be fabricated somewhere. Sure, the sysadmin as a job position won't vanish, no. I'm not afraid of this. As many companies still won't use these techniques in 30years and somebody has to build the bricks, design the "brick-standard", etc. But in most companies I know operator positions pay less then sysadmin positions. (This also explained why they paid less than my current job, despite being well-funded.) So companies have an.. opportunity to save on much money that this "lousy human resources position" takes in the balance.
Would you love to "just play with bricks" or do you want to invent "new bricks"? Where I currently work, we, in some cases, simply CAN'T buy a working piece of software. Our infrastructure is simply to big. That's why we rely on standards and correct RFC-Implementations and the like. I was in 4-5 inhouse vendor presentations for a software or hardware. And in 3 cases it was point-clear from minute 10 that the entire system that vendor had designed won't work for us. As we would use too much bandwidth/requests/whatever and the system couldn't scale. So we have to think about sharding/fencing if we do want to use this software or hardware.
Do you consider yourself a real linux sysadmin if you have root on none of your servers? Yes.. A little bit pathetic and emotional, but still.. For me it's "sysadmin = root rights", as the role defines the rights. If you have only admin rights in your tool? That's fine, but then you're only a "tooladmin" to me. Like I don't see people as network engineer who are only allowed to change/patch network cables, as a network engineer for me does configure switches, firewalls, routers, etc.
Do I have to re-think this? (Especially with 1. taken into accout.) Personally I don't think so. And.. The company may be searching for "linux sysadmins" but I think mainly they are in need of "operators with solid linux background", which IS a difference. But still I'm interested in other viewpoints.
Your thoughts?
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