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Remember, the time when you installed your first windows server 2000, did you ever expect to see next mature windows server in 5 years? Now, we are just planning to upgrade our servers to 2008 editions while they are giving out 2012!!!! Can I really walk so fast on my infrastructure?
Or consider SQL Server …. 2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and I just saw some news about 2012 CTP1 … wow, how could it be so fast?
Maybe the version war is not about answering customers’ needs or giving them comfort! it seems to be a competition war … user is not so much important than before or they just want us to believe Humans are limited … let’s make some robot admins!
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? What do you do in your infrastructure? -
The reason is what Ray Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns. Since the first molecules started replicating on this planet evolution advanced at an exponential rate. Technology is just the continuation of this process. I recommend reading Kurzweil’s books The Singularity is Near and the last one How to Create a Mind which got him hired by Larry Page.
Robot admins? Sounds pretty futuristic but in a way this is what Kurzweil is trying at Google. As soon as you have a machine that understands natural language you no longer need PowerShell or administration tools to tell computers what to do.
You think only Google’s data centers have enough resources to create a mind? In about 10 years a $1000 computer will be powerful enough to simulate a human brain.
It is hard to imagine how the future admin will look like, but I think this video is pretty close. 😉
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It’s really basic supply and demand… with the consumerization of IT and the availability of Internet access, people are wanting to do more and more with their devices. Do you know how many people I support that rarely make plain old voice calls on their smart phones? I don’t expect to be able to support all these new devices and features with an OS that was released more than a couple of years ago.
The consumer side has always been ahead of corporate IT. Microsoft’s new direction is to offer more updates more frequently that address features that their customers want. Corporate IT is going to have to start automating more to keep up. It never ceases to amaze me how many people still lay down operating systems and software on laptops, desktops, and/or servers by hand.
Really, you can already do quite a bit with System Center without human interaction. It does require some up front work of setting it up, but it can still be fully automated. Operations Manager registers an alert, Orchestrator starts a Config Manager task to fix the issue, Orchestrator logs and closes a support request, and the admin receives an email that an issue was resolved.
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Nice,
But What should we do?
Is an Admin capable of learning all these things together? Or should we limit more and more to one area so we can walk with the technology?
Kyle just mentioned a good example, i.e. System Center. The questions is that did you really put some of your old-habit methods away and moved to the new tool? I am talking about how to find time learning and coping with these new things?
I sometime think … “it is so nice that I am obliged to use my mind so much (if I really do) but I will become crazy soon” … 🙂
Anyway, thank you for brainstorming
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Kyle, I think we are only at the beginning of this process where more and more fields are taken over by IT. This is the main reason why IT departments are growing despite improved automation.
As to computers troubleshooting without human interaction, I think the capabilities of machines in this area are currently extremely limited. The vast majority of troubleshooting is still done by humans. I don’t think that we will see big changes here as long as computers have to be programmed.
However, things will change fundamentally soon. In a few years computers will be powerful enough to run sophisticated neural networks which will allow them to learn by themselves without the need to be programmed. Watson was only able to beat the best humans in Jeopardy because it could learn from unstructured content. Compared to the changes that await us here, the consumerization of IT and even the Internet are relatively harmless.
Amir, specialization can help you with your career, however, it is also dangerous because things are changing so fast now that your field of expertise can become obsolete overnight. Thus if you want to specialize, you should always pay attention to signs of change and keep an eye on the general picture
It is not necessary that you learn about all the new features of these new tools in detail. You only need to get a rough idea of their capabilities and then just google the details when needed. It is true that technology advances faster than ever before. However, we also have new tools to cope with these changes.
The times where it was helpful to acquire as much knowledge as possible are over. What counts now are skills and you don’t get those skills by studying books or wasting your time in class rooms. Learning by doing becomes more and more important in IT because this is the only way to acquire skills. These skills together with the help of search engines allow you to work with any tool even if you never used it before or passed an exam about it. The currencies of the future are intuition, creativity and skills. Knowledge is out. Computers were always better data-crunchers and in the future they will also be better knowledge-crunchers.
Thus all you have to do is play with these new tools in a test environment and read blogs like 4sysops to stay up-to date. 😉
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