What will administrators look like in the future
Another day to reflect on the labor of system administrators. What will a system administrator job look like in the future. One guess is, more of a developer than a server administrator.
A system administrator role in Information Technology (IT) has certainly changed over the years and will continue evolve. Back in the day, there was a lot of time working on servers, autoexe.bat file editing, boot.ini file to have to work with, but then eventually, virtual servers, and '...as a Service' products. It is these 'services' that more and more administrators work with and not so much 'servers'. Therefore, the jobs are increasingly becoming more software driven.
Oh sure, IT has always been about software, but a majority of time was hardware. Now, it's basically all about software, or coding, or working with applications/processes that allow more tasks to be done with less people.
Think about PowerShell and Desired State Configuration. With DSC, literally, millions of servers and can be built by one person, or a small team of people, building and maintaining some simple PS scripts. For example, in O365, there are about 150,000 physical servers running the Exchange online service. Ever 30 days, each server is rebuilt from bare metal scratch, and the latest OS and Exchange version are installed. That's roughly 5,000 servers per day. Do you think someone is clicking 'next, next' in a GUI? Nope, all scripted.
The point of the story is, our jobs continue to modify and lately, they are looking more and more like developers. So don't think the word developer is a bad thing, because ultimately, as you progress in your IT career, chances are, you'll continue to do more and more coding and overall, more development work.
So enjoy today off and look forward to being able to manage even more resources, with fewer people. Our job is to eliminate ourselves, so go learn something new to be more efficient at your role.
Mike