Twitter: It's the end of the sysadmin as we know it Twitter says it's the end of the sysadmin as we know it. Speaking this morning at the annual Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Twitter operations man John Adams warned sysadmins they won't succeed on today's intertubes unless they learn to do a bit more than system administration. Sysadmin 2.0, he said, must develop certain …
How did planning for growth and expansion become 'data mining'? I thought that buzzword was reserved for crap along the lines of 'Business Intelligence," not "plot the traffic and hold up a ruler, add 10%, get the PO signed by the boss."
I suppose if you're trying to scale something as important as Twitter, with its super-critical real-time operations, on a language as fast as Ruby and a database as scalable as MySQL, you would think that planning for growth was some new derivative of rocket science.
"The other model - which pretty much describes Unicorn - is where you have one line, and when a cashier is done, it grabs the next person from that one line. This creates a very rapid response."
Nah, that's how Primark does it. Certainly doesn't guarantee a very rapid response fro what I can tell.
It's important to note that they are making progress, rediscovering ancient truths and understanding their implications.
In another two or three decades, they'll have grown up and understood the importance of good administration, and will be knocking on the Web 3.0 kids who will be, in turn, discovering that you need to control user authentication.
It's a learning process, guys. Let the kids learn.
Just shows how clueless some of these companies are - and they hold a couple of million idiots personal details....
Analyzing data is for Business Processes Management staff - not sysadmins, never was and never will be... unless they don't want it done properly???
"A system administrator is not just a system administrator anymore. You have to use analytics. You have to grab data. You have to look at where a site is trending and where things are going so you can scale..."
No that's the Data Analyst's job! When you grow up Mr Twatter and leave the safety of the campus, you will realise that IT in the real world moves at a snail's pace, relatively speakling, and people are very slow to adapt.
When it's 2am on a Sunday morning and your 32 node cluster keeps crashing, all the freaking stats in the world mean nothing against a shat-hot SysAdmin who knows his kit and O/S and can trace a problem in minutes to get your Web 2.0 presence back online.
Just f**k of back the kindergarten, eh?
John can go stuff it. This speaks more to the current trend by hotshot developers to look down their nose at the "lowly" sysadmins (and making ridiculous comments like this from that erroneous perception) than it does to what sysadmins actually do.
These same people would probably be surprised to know that most sysadmins know many things about many things because that's the nature of the job... even though all you think we do is swap tapes.
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