[[Short Tip] Use Red Hat Satellite 6 As An Inventory Resource In Ansible
Kody Coste
This page is written as a protest against overcomplexity and bizarre data center atmosphere typical in "semi-outsourced" or fully outsourced datacenters ;-). Unix/Linux sysadmins are being killed by overcomplexity of the environment, some new"for profit" technocults like DevOps, and outsourcing. Large swats of Linux knowledge (and many excellent books) were made obsolete by Red Hat with the introduction of systemd. Especially affected are older, most experienced members of the team, who have unique set of organization knowledge as well as specifics of their career which allowed them to watch the development of Linux almost from the version 0.92.
[Short Tip] Use Red Hat Satellite 6 as an inventory resource in Ansible
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System administration is still a unique area were people with the ability to program can display their own creativity with relative ease and can still enjoy "old style" atmosphere of software development, when you yourself put a specification, implement it, test the program and then use it in daily work. This is a very exciting, unique opportunity that no DevOps can ever provide.
But the conditions are getting worse and worse. That's why an increasing number of sysadmins are far from being excited about working in those positions, or outright want to quick the field (or, at least, work 4 days a week). And that include sysadmins who have tremendous speed and capability to process and learn new information. Even for them "enough is enough". The answer is different for each individual sysadmins, but usually is some variation of the following themes:
In organizations with more than a few hundred IT staff and developers, it becomes nearly impossible for one person to do and know everything. This movement toward specializing in individual areas seems almost natural. That, however, does not provide a free ticket for people to turn a blind eye.
You know the story: Company installs new application, nobody understands it yet, so an expert is hired. Often, the person with a certification in using the new application only really knows how to run that application. Perhaps they aren't interested in learning anything else, because their skill is in high demand right now. And besides, everything else in the infrastructure is run by people who specialize in those elements. Everything is taken care of.
If you hire someone certified in the application, operating system, or network vendor you use, that is precisely what you get. Certifications may be a nice filter to quickly identify who has direct knowledge in the area you're hiring for, but often they indicate specialization or compensation for lack of experience.
With virtualization, some aspects of resource competition get better and some remain the same. When first implemented, most groups will be running their own type of virtualization for their platform. The next step, I've most often seen, is for test servers to get virtualized. If a new group is formed to manage the virtualization infrastructure, virtual machines can be allocated to various application and server teams from a central pool and everyone is now sharing. Or, they begin sharing and then demand their own physical hardware to be isolated from others' resource hungry utilization. This is nonetheless a step in the right direction. Auto migration and guaranteed resource policies can go a long way toward making shared infrastructure, even between competing groups, a viable option.
See the problem? Specialized teams are distinct and by nature adversarial. Specialized staffers often relegate themselves into a niche knowing that as long as they continue working at large enough companies, "someone else" will take care of all the other pieces.
The tragic part of the current environment is that it is like shifting sands. And it is not only due to the "natural process of crapification of operating systems" in which the OS gradually loses its architectural integrity. The pace of change is just too fast to adapt for mere humans. And most of it represents "change for the sake of change" not some valuable improvement or extension of capabilities.
If you are a sysadmin, who is writing his own scripts, you write on the sand beach, spending a lot of time thinking over and debugging your scripts. Which raise you productivity and diminish the number of possible errors. But the next OS version or organizational change wipes considerable part of your word and you need to revise your scripts again. The tale of Sisyphus can now be re-interpreted as a prescient warning about the thankless task of sysadmin to learn new staff and maintain their own script library ;-) Sometimes a lot of work is wiped out because the corporate brass decides to switch to a different flavor of Linux, or we add "yet another flavor" due to a large acquisition. Add to this inevitable technological changes and the question arise, can't you get a more respectable profession, in which 66% of knowledge is not replaced in the next ten years. For a talented and not too old person staying employed in sysadmin profession is probably a mistake, or at least a very questionable decision.
Balkanization of linux demonstrated also in the Babylon Tower of system programming languages (C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Go, Java to name a few) and systems that supposedly should help you but mostly do quite opposite (Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc). Add to this monitoring infrastructure (say Nagios) and you definitely have an information overload.
Inadequate training just add to the stress. First of all corporations no longer want to pay for it. So you are your own and need to do it mostly on your free time, as the workload is substantial in most organizations. Of course summer "dead season" at least partially exists, but it is rather short. Using free or low cost courses if they are available, or buying your own books and trying to learn new staff using them is of course is the mark of any good sysadmin, but should not be the only source of new knowledge. Communication with colleagues who have high level of knowledge in selected areas is as important or even more important. But this is very difficult as often sysadmin works in isolation. Professional groups like Linux user group exist mostly in metropolitan areas of large cities. Coronavirus made those groups even more problematic.
Days when you can for a week travel to vendor training center and have a chance to communicate with other admins from different organization for a week (which probably was the most valuable part of the whole exercise; although I can tell that training by Sun (Solaris) and IBM (AIX) in late 1990th was really high quality using highly qualified instructors, from which you can learn a lot outside the main topic of the course. Thos days are long in the past. Unlike "Trump University" Sun courses could probably have been called "Sun University." Most training now is via Web and chances for face-to-face communication disappeared. Also from learning "why" the stress now is on learning of "how". Why topic typically are reserved to "advanced" courses.
Also the necessary to relearn staff again and again (and often new technologies/daemons/version of OS) are iether the same, or even inferior to previous, or represent open scam in which training is the way to extract money from lemmings (Agile, most of DevOps hoopla, etc). This is typical neoliberal mentality (" greed is good") implemented in education. There is also tendency to treat virtual machines and cloud infrastructure as separate technologies, which requires separate training and separate set of certifications (AWS, Azure). This is a kind of infantilization of profession when a person who learned a lot of staff in previous 10 years need to forget it and relearn most of it again and again.
Of course. sysadmins are not the only suffered. Computer scientists also now struggle with the excessive level of complexity and too quickly shifting sand. Look at the tragedy of Donald Knuth with this life long idea to create comprehensive monograph for system programmers (The Art of Computer programming). He was flattened by the shifting sands and probably will not be able to finish even volume 4 (out of seven that were planned) in his lifetime.
Nobody is now surprised to see a server with 128GB of RAM, laptop with 16Gb of RAM, or cellphones with 4GB of RAM and 2GHZ CPU (Please note that IBM Pc stated with 1 MB of RAM (of which only 640KB was available for programs) and 4.7 MHz (not GHz) single core CPU without floating arithmetic unit). Hardware evolution while painful is inevitable and it changes the software landscape. Thanks God hardware progress slowed down recently as it reached physical limits of technology (we probably will not see 2 nanometer lithography based CPU and 8GHz CPU clock speed in our lifetimes) and progress now is mostly measured by the number of cores packed in the same die.
The there is other set of significant changes which is course not by progress of hardware (or software) but mainly by fashion and the desire of certain (and powerful) large corporations to entrench their market position. Such changes are more difficult to accept. It is difficult or even impossible to predict which technology became fashionable tomorrow. For example how long DevOps will remain in fashion.
Typically such techno-fashion lasts around a decade. After that it typically fades in oblivion, or even is debunked, and former idols shattered (verification crazy is a nice example here). Fro example this strange re-invention of the ideas of "glass-walls datacenter" under then banner of DevOps (and old timers still remember that IBM datacenters were hated with passion, and this hate created additional non-technological incentive for mini-computers and later for IBM PC) is characterized by the level of hype usually reserved for women fashion. Moreover sometimes it looks to me that the movie The Devil Wears Prada is a subtle parable on sysadmin work.
Add to this horrible job market, especially for university graduated and older sysadmins (see Over 50 and unemployed ) and one probably start suspect that the life of modern sysadmin is far from paradise. When you read some job description on sites like Monster, Dice or Indeed you just ask yourself, if those people really want to hire anybody, or often such a job position is just a smoke screen for H1B candidates job certification. The level of details often is so precise that it is almost impossible to fit this specialization. They do not care about the level of talent, they do not want to train a suitable candidate. They want a person who fit 100% from day 1. Also often position are available mostly in place like New York of San Francisco, were both rent and property prices are high and growing while income growth has been stagnant.
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