It's not that sysadmins are going to disappear, it's just that with IaaS and the automation tooling that's been developed in the past decade teams don't need to be nearly as large. The role has also changed.
A few people can manage a deployment of a thousand server instances now fairly easily (I've been on teams like that). A decade ago you'd be renting colo space, racking/stacking yourself, managing your networks, swapping dead hardware, and managing all the software that goes on top (I've also been on a team like that). You'd need a large team dedicated to just ops and sysadmining.
Hiring today is different. A sysadmin didn't necessarily need to know how to code beyond some scripting with bash or perl. These days in order to manage the complexity of large cloud systems you probably should be a solid developer in addition to having a deep knowledge of systems. Or if you're a small startup you'll probably have your devs work additionally on your infrastructure or use a PaaS.
> It's not that sysadmins are going to disappear, it's just that with IaaS and the automation tooling that's been developed in the past decade teams don't need to be nearly as large. The role has also changed.
The sysadmin's role is to automate themselves out of a job: you should not need to do anything twice.
For some reason, the job never disappears and new stuff keeps coming along.
(I do know one guy who successfully automated most of this job. He got bored and got a new job.)
A few people can manage a deployment of a thousand server instances now fairly easily (I've been on teams like that). A decade ago you'd be renting colo space, racking/stacking yourself, managing your networks, swapping dead hardware, and managing all the software that goes on top (I've also been on a team like that). You'd need a large team dedicated to just ops and sysadmining.
Hiring today is different. A sysadmin didn't necessarily need to know how to code beyond some scripting with bash or perl. These days in order to manage the complexity of large cloud systems you probably should be a solid developer in addition to having a deep knowledge of systems. Or if you're a small startup you'll probably have your devs work additionally on your infrastructure or use a PaaS.