I AM SYSADMIN - USENIX · Friday, November 14, 14. ... Now I’m not.” Friday, November 14, 14....
Transcript of I AM SYSADMIN - USENIX · Friday, November 14, 14. ... Now I’m not.” Friday, November 14, 14....
I AM SYSADMIN(AND SO CAN YOU!)
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April 2014
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Musings: Rick Farrow“Like Elizabeth Zwicky writes in this issue, I
am not a system administrator. Oh, I can still fake it, by managing my own systems (DNS, SMTP, DHCP, and HTTP) and
occasionally even consulting locally. But I gave up on being a sysadmin when I found out that I wasn’t very interested in a very important aspect of it: building scripts and
systems to automate the work that needed to be done routinely.”
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The Death of System AdministrationTodd Underwood
“We are in the final days of system administration.”
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How to Be a Better System Administrator and Then Something ElseElizabeth Zwicky
“I once was a system administrator. Now I’m not.”
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With these skills: You can enable:
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Stigma?• SysAdmin’s apparent are:
• Grumpy grey-beards & BOFH
• Stuck in the dragon-slayer past & epic story tellers
• “Tape Swappers” who love non-automatable repetitive tasks
• Unable and/or Unwilling to code
• A junior level person that may become more one day
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Contributing Factors• “Automate yourself out of a job” & “Keep it up”
are the oldest SA axiom, but tools to do this were poor, complex, or inefficient in the past
• We used products as designed
• We were (sometimes) trained by the vendor & utilized vendor support
• There was a “right way” and “wrong way”
• The server room was a walled garden, and we were the gardeners
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Increasingly, these aren’t true anymore.
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What SA’s Do
• System Admins:
• Build and maintain systems to facilitate the needs of a group of users (directly or indirectly)
• Support the users of the system to efficiently accomplish tasks
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Word Games
• No-Ops
• Post-Ops
• DevOps
• SRE
These are philosophies of operation.
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Stop the insanity!
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What they mean• “Cloud” changes everything
• Most of the world is software defined, and software is malleable
• Automate all the things
• Write more code (software solves every problem)
• Every company should be as l337 as Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.
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Why didn’t I think of that?
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The Dev Reality
• Devs Aren’t Helpless Anymore
• Services are the new Libraries (Dep Management)
• Ops can not bottleneck development anymore
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The Ops Reality
• Most shops consist of 3 or less admins
• Daily stresses make project work nearly impossible (not enough time)
• Frequently IT & Ops are lumped together
• Ops technology moves simultaneously too fast and too slow (eg: Nagios & Ansible)
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The Dilemma• Yes, Cloud changes the game.
• Yes, Software is more important than ever.
• Yes, I need to more with less and get out of developers way
• But, who builds the cloud(s)?
• But, who runs the cloud(s)?
• But, how do I keep up with the technology?
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SysAdmin isn’t Dying.
It is Evolving.
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Why So Hard?
SA’s are expected to not just operate the business but to also build the systems used to operate the business
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Requirements for Change
• Freedom to innovate and evolve means embracing failure and learning... which means culture & management maters!
• Acquiring the skills takes time... which means support & education are important!
Give us an environment in which we can evolve.Friday, November 14, 14
So how do we do that?
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Divide & Conquer
• If you have legacy, make a concerted effort to eliminate it
• Adopt SaaS where you can
• Use the public clouds where you can
• Build & Run internal clouds (*aaS)
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Development & Deployment are changing
• Vagrant is awesome (IaaS Model on a laptop)
• Docker is awesome (Repeatable Laptop to Production App Container)
• Config Management isn’t just for Ops
• Self-Service Infrastructure is a signup away (Cloud)
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Small is the new Big• Micro-Services (neo-SOA) & Distributed
Architectures are awesome, particularly when containerized
• New Essential skills:
• RESTful APIs (curl & OO Ninja)
• Message Queues (RabbitMQ)
• Service Coordination & Discovery (ZooKeeper/etcd & Consul)
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PERL & PHP
• I have seen PERL6... its Ruby
• Python & Ruby should be the standard languages of the admin today
• Go is the language for Ops
• Everyone should know a little JavaScript & how to use Node.js
• BASH & AWK still rule though
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APIs are the new
CLI
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HTML has changed
• Update on HTML5 & CSS3 Basics
• Try out client-side frameworks (Angular)
• Try out Node.js for back-end services
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Metrics!
• Lots of great SaaS solutions:
• Circonus, Librato, DataDog, etc.
• Graphite is the go-to solution
• Watch this space!
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Logging
• Splunk is still great
• JSON logging formats are here to stay
• ELK is.... high maintenance, but neat
• Logstash is your swiss army knife
• Great SaaS solutions available:
• ... but just use Sumologic
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Discover KV Stores
• NoSQL makes little sense from a non-programatic viewpoint
• Play with MongoDB or LevelDB from JavaScript (Node.js)
• Discover the joy of caching with Redis!
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Git
• Learn Git
• ... Learn Git better (Lynda.com)
• Use Github without shame!
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Continuous Integration
• Play with Jenkins!
• (Its not as magical or complicated as you might think)
• Check out Travis for Github (travis-ci.org)
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Standardization
• Document procedures
• ... then automate it down to a single step
• ... then remove that step
• You can’t improve what you don’t understand
• Iterate from current-state to future-state
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Compliance Basics
• Know what controls, policy, and procedures are and how they fit together
• Learn about information classification (FIPS 199)
• Know the risk assessment basics (NIST SP 800-39)
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Be a Leader
• Share knowledge
• Take the initiative
• Make the time to improve yourself & your infrastructure
• Empower your colleagues across the organization
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Don’t be a hater
• Encourage peers to try new things!
• Share successes!
• Embrace failure and learn together!
• Assholes kill innovation
• Try & Appreciate everything
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Sites that can help• Ops School (opsschool.org)
• Lynda.com
• Pluralsight.com
• SafariBooksOnline.com
• CodeSchool.com
• Ask questions on Google
• Watch presentations on YouTube & Vimeo
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$SYSTEM admin for life.
Ben Rockwood@benrhttp://cuddletech.com
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