2 comments

[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 11.9 ms ] thread
What a bit of drivel, as long as there are systems to be managed there will be sysadmins, I work at a hosting shop and you roughly need one sysadmin for every ten or so servers regardless of what they are, things just need to be taken care of.

Mail queues need to be monitored and cleared, kernels patched, customer issues need to be escalated. When you start getting into the size of a company with over 100 non-technical staff you will find you need at least one or two admins just to keep up with issues that come up.

Thanks for the input madao, but I disagree. First of all, I'm not saying sysadmins are going away in any respect, but I do believe that with increased efficiency there will be fewer admins needed for any given business.

I currently support over 150 production systems on Amazon, so your estimation of 10 servers per sysadmin is outdated and inaccurate. Even by Instagram's own admission they manage hundreds of systems with only 5 sysadmins. By your calculation, Instagram would have needed at least double that.