Modern System Administration

Foreword

After a few years of job hopping, I finally landed a full-time job as a system administrator at a sizable financial institution. The people managing servers and executing shell scripts sat on the second floor, and the developers who wrote the applications sat on the third. I never questioned why an elevator separated us or why more communication happened over support tickets than in person, but that was the hierarchy.

I joined the company during the winter holidays, and guess who didn’t have any vacation time. I found myself sitting alone on the second floor processing support tickets. Developers opened deployment request tickets, and I ran scripts on each server to fulfill the requests and close the tickets. I eventually got tired of that process and wrote a script that basically did my job for me. Instead of spending 30 minutes running scripts across a set of machines, I was able to do it in less than one. I was closing tickets almost as fast as they were being opened. One day someone from upstairs came to visit and asked me how I was moving so fast. I showed them how I automated myself out of a job, and somehow I ended up with a better one. I was continuously being presented with new challenges, at which point I decided to cut out the go-between, and moved my desk to the third floor, blurring the lines between dev and ops.

No good deed goes unpunished. My management chain informed me that I was compromising existing processes designed around industry regulations and ...