Our Jobs Are ChangingMandi WallsLISA 2013

November 6, 2013

Thursday, November 14, 13

whoami

• Mandi Walls

• Technical Practice Manager at Opscode

• Sysadmin

• @lnxchk

Thursday, November 14, 13

Nope

• What I’m not going to talk about:

• Chef. It’s awesome. I talk about Chef all the time.

• DevOps. Some of this will start to sound a little DevvyOpsy though.

• Gender and diversity. It’s a thing, and other folks have the science.

Thursday, November 14, 13

Yep

• What I am going to talk about

• The future. Yours, mine, ours together.

• The world. It’s big and changing.

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Why I Care

• Truth is, I work for a vendor

• I talk to our customers and community every day

• What I see in the industry worries me

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Evolution of the Field

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Legacies

• Protect expensive, specially-purchased systems

• Run stuff

• Fix things

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Monetary Investment

• Gear costs money: machines, networks, storage, electricity, cooling

• The higher those costs, the greater the risk of failure for new products, services, and features

• Cost impacts attitude, behavior, creates a culture of “no”

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The Generation of “No”

• Sysadmins rewarded for protecting investments

• Hoarders of information

• BOFHs

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Shoulders of Giants

Progress in a field doesn’t happen when everyone has to start from scratch

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Specialization

• Over time, complexity bred specialties

• Networking, storage, datacenter operations, web operations, IT

• Federation of tasks can create positive outcomes and negative outcomes

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Evolution of Practice

• Three stages of the evolution of a field

• craft

• commercial

• engineering

• Mary Shaw at CMU “Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software”

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Craft Stage

• Talented amateurs

• Use of intuition, what “feels like it will work this time”

• Early tools built mostly for their own use

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Commercial Stage

• Market expansion, greater demand

• Standard procedures start to emerge

• Practitioners are more carefully selected and have some training

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Engineering Stage

• Practitioners begin to apply scientific principles

• Principles emerge

• Experimentation becomes more sophisticated

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Where Are We?

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Challenges to Moving Forward

• Unskilled workers hold organizations back

• Investing in training and professional development

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Bringing individuals up to speed is a tough job

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In the meantime, the ground under our feet is changing

We have to continue learning as well

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Why Does it Even Matter?

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Digital Economy

• Increasing: more of day-to-day life is lived, or augmented, online

• Expanding reach: more non-technical people engaging with tech

• Globalization: developing economies without technical legacy

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Reach of Technology

• In many countries, connectedness is near constant

• The systems behind these services are increasingly complex and interconnected

• Users expect all services to perform at a certain level

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Engagement of Non-Specialists

• Barrier to entry lowered to engage more consumers

• They’re not “muggles”, they’re users, customers

• Change the way we engage with others

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Globalizing

• Emerging economies leapfrog over legacy infrastructure requirements

• Individuals find new ways to use technology to better their lives

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Ubiquity

• Escaping technology takes work

• The growth of technology mean more opportunity for more people

• Unlikely uses for technology fuels improvements in quality of life

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What Do We Enable?

• Projects like Nano Ganesh from Tata Indicom

• Indian farmers use mobile technology to water crops

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What Do We Enable?

• Companies like Cemex

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What Do We Enable?

• Changes to education, healthcare, safety

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There is No Place for BOFHs in this New Technological World

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How Do We Enable Ourselves?

• Self awareness

• Organizational awareness

• Participation in the field

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New Skills

Borrowing practices from software engineering

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Learn To Touch Type

• Dude.

• Seriously.

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Version Control

• PTSD from that one time you checked something in with RCS and forgot to leave a local copy

• Modern tools like git integrate with other systems, deployment tools

• It’s important to have history - not just for code, but for your config files on your systems

• Create a single workflow for everyone, including dev if you have it

• Pull early, push often

Thursday, November 14, 13

Learn To Code

• Scariest slide in this talk

• Pick a language, learn it. bash counts. PowerShell is awesome.

• Increase efficiency, repeatability of your work - the maturation of tools brings the whole profession forward

• It’s a skill that you can learn, it’s not magic, and it can’t be limited to people who have “software engineer” in their job title

Thursday, November 14, 13

Working in the Cloud

• The cloud is our fault. Say “no” enough times, your organization will stop asking you for things

• The commoditization of the hardware layer will catch up with us

• Utility computing brings new challenges and shines light on the “what ifs” we’ve been talking to others about for years

• Use the cloud to learn new things you might need in your job

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Document Systems

• Foster transparency and trust by documenting your processes

• If your team doesn’t have (or like) wikis, use something like sphinx

• Give everyone access, no hiding and hoarding

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Testing and Code Review

• A set of still emerging tools, like serverspec

• Builds trust in your processes when you know your change works

• If you have multiple people on a team, check each other’s work, formalize the process with a tool like garrett

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Common Thread

• Be proactive

• Say Yes

• If you can’t say Yes, ask questions before saying No

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Where Do We Go

• Cost of systems

• Now mitigated by the cloud and other services

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• Cost of bad behaviors

• We can work on getting to Yes

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• Cost of information hoarding and reinventing the wheel - the opportunity cost of repeating work

• We can be open and share our knowledge

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We can build amazing things, but not by ourselves

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Our future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed

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Next Steps

• Changing our first principles

• Rejecting the pull of the BOFH

• Refocusing systems work on enabling the organization to do great things

• Finding our value proposition when we aren’t the guardians of large expensive systems - we’re the facilitators of large amazing ideas

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Why?

Because some day we are going to be running the O2 systems on starships

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