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I realize that my basement servers have better uptime than AWS this year!

I think most sysadmin don't plan for AWS outage. And economically it makes sense.

But it makes me wonder, is sysadmin a lost art?



> But it makes me wonder, is sysadmin a lost art?

Yes. 15-20 years ago when I was still working on network-adjacent stuff I witnessed the shift to the devops movement.

To be clear, the fact that devops don't plan for AWS failures isn't an indication that they lack the sysadmin gene. Sysadmins will tell you very similar "X can never go down" or "not worth having a backup for service Y".

But deep down devops are developers who just want to get their thing running, so they'll google/serveroverflow their way into production without any desire to learn the intricacies of the underlying system. So when something breaks, they're SOL.

"Thankfully" nowadays containers and application hosting abstracts a lot of it back away. So today I'd be willing to say that devops are sufficient for small to medium companies (and dare I say more efficient?).


> But deep down devops are developers who just want to get their thing running, so they'll google/serveroverflow their way into production without any desire to learn the intricacies of the underlying system. So when something breaks, they're SOL.

Depends on the devops team. I have worked with so many devops engineers who came from network engineering, sysadmin, or SecOps backgrounds. They all bring a different perspective and set of priorities.


That's not very surprising. At this point you could say that your microwave has a better uptime. The complexity comparison to all the Amazon cloud services and infrastructure would be roughly the same.


So, we need to centralise all our compute onto one provider because economies of scale and its too complicated to do it well…

… but we should not compare them to self-hosting because hosting that much data and compute is complicated.

The emperor has no clothes.


> But it makes me wonder, is sysadmin a lost art?

I dunno, let me ask chatgpt. Hmmm, it said yes.


ChatGPT often says yes to both a question and its inverse. People like to hear yes more than no.


You missed their point. They were making a joke about over-reliance on AI.


Does this include your SPoF Internet connection?


I have a redundant fiber with two providers, I'm a LIR and I do my BGP, my internet is fine.




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