Modern System Administration

Introducing Modern System Administration

Systems are made up of a group of components and their relationships to one another to form a complex whole. You are fundamentally trying to navigate the chaos to manage your systems sustainably. There is no one right way of system management, but there are paths you can take on your journey to understanding your systems to reduce their physical and mental toil and build a lifelong career tackling interesting challenges.

I’ve organized this book to provide the resources you need to prepare for your journey to adopt modern system administration technologies, tools, and practices. In this introduction, I will give you some high-level goals that will help you forge your own path to take care of your systems reliably and sustainably.

Map Your Journey

In many ways, system administrators are like hikers embarking into the wilderness. Like Figure I-1 shows, we like to think that somewhere out there is a map that will tell us exactly what to do and when to do it, and if we follow that map, we will achieve a perfectly maintained system. We imagine that the path we’re about to walk is well lit and that the map we find will have clearly defined milestones and goals.

But modern system administration is more like Figure I-2. You can prepare yourself for the journey with some universal tools: the fundamental and critical practices of assembling, monitoring, and scaling any system. You can’t predict which specific tools you’ll need on your journey or ...