I AM SYSADMIN - USENIX · Friday, November 14, 14. ... Now I’m not.” Friday, November 14, 14....

I AM SYSADMIN(AND SO CAN YOU!)

Friday, November 14, 14

April 2014


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.”


The Death of System AdministrationTodd Underwood

“We are in the final days of system administration.”


How to Be a Better System Administrator and Then Something ElseElizabeth Zwicky

“I once was a system administrator. Now I’m not.”



With these skills: You can enable:


Stigma?• SysAdmin’s apparent are:

• Grumpy grey-beards & BOFH

• Stuck in the dragon-slayer past & epic story tellers

• “Tape Swappers” who love non-automatable repetitive tasks

• Unable and/or Unwilling to code

• A junior level person that may become more one day



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


Increasingly, these aren’t true anymore.


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


Word Games

• No-Ops

• Post-Ops

• DevOps

• SRE

These are philosophies of operation.


Stop the insanity!


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.


Why didn’t I think of that?


The Dev Reality

• Devs Aren’t Helpless Anymore

• Services are the new Libraries (Dep Management)

• Ops can not bottleneck development anymore


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)


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?


SysAdmin isn’t Dying.

It is Evolving.



Why So Hard?

SA’s are expected to not just operate the business but to also build the systems used to operate the business


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.Friday, November 14, 14

So how do we do that?


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)


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)


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)


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


APIs are the new

CLI


HTML has changed

• Update on HTML5 & CSS3 Basics

• Try out client-side frameworks (Angular)

• Try out Node.js for back-end services


Metrics!

• Lots of great SaaS solutions:

• Circonus, Librato, DataDog, etc.

• Graphite is the go-to solution

• Watch this space!


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


Discover KV Stores

• NoSQL makes little sense from a non-programatic viewpoint

• Play with MongoDB or LevelDB from JavaScript (Node.js)

• Discover the joy of caching with Redis!


Git

• Learn Git

• ... Learn Git better (Lynda.com)

• Use Github without shame!


Continuous Integration

• Play with Jenkins!

• (Its not as magical or complicated as you might think)

• Check out Travis for Github (travis-ci.org)


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


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 800-39)


Be a Leader

• Share knowledge

• Take the initiative

• Make the time to improve yourself & your infrastructure

• Empower your colleagues across the organization


Don’t be a hater

• Encourage peers to try new things!

• Share successes!

• Embrace failure and learn together!

• Assholes kill innovation

• Try & Appreciate everything


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


$SYSTEM admin for life.

Ben Rockwood@benrhttp://cuddletech.com


http://cuddletech.com

http://cuddletech.com

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