our jobs are changing. can we keep up?
DESCRIPTION
My talk from LISA 2013 in Washington DCTRANSCRIPT
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Our Jobs Are ChangingMandi WallsLISA 2013
November 6, 2013
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whoami
• Mandi Walls
• Technical Practice Manager at Opscode
• Sysadmin
• @lnxchk
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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.
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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
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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
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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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