Developers Replacing Network Admins with Cloud Computing
Very interesting article, Why virtualization is shaking up IT data center, that begins to hint at how data centers will change as virtualization and more importantly unified computing gain predominance. In particular, I was struck by one passage:
Those not finding such next-generation systems cost effective will likely migrate to external cloud environments that themselves use these concepts to deliver service. In fact, in terms of pure numbers, that may be the way a majority of companies choose to go. Many cloud experts note, however, that the technicians doing so will be developers, not system administrators, which again is a change in most data center cultures. More on that later.
By moving data and applications to the cloud, an organization will not need to maintain network admin skillsets, rather what will be more in demand will be the ability to interact with and extract data from the cloud using programmatic interfaces. Increasingly, the choice of the interface is REST based as is witnessed by Amazon Web Services. So the question arises, if an organization is 100% cloud-based for all of its IT services, is their a role for a network admin? Increasingly, the answer appears to be "no".
March 5th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Prashanth:
While I do agree with you point that a cloud infrastructure will drive the need for a new skill set based around leveraging the cloud, I do not see the demise of the network admin, or the storage admin, or any of the other roles for that matter. A disruptive change always brings with it the fear of displaced jobs, but I don’t think history supports that theory. When I first worked with banks on converting from a pure SNA shop to \Cisco Blue\, this was certainly a concern, which did not pan out. Certainly we got rid of FEPs and the like, the job of running the back office infrastructure remained intact. Similarly, the introduction of IP telephony did not mean the voice team went away, or as we look at storage today, neither storage networking not FCoE are going to eliminate the need for a storage team.
What does happen is that the nature of the roles change, productivity/efficiency increases and teams get to focus more tightly–for example voice teams can focus on voice apps and voice services and not have to worry about voice transport anymore.
I believe virtualization and unified computing will continue to extend this trend. For example, with server virtualization, the server admin becomes less concerned with physical server provisioning and can focus more on optimization, performance, availability, etc.
Omar Sultan
Data Center Solutions
Cisco
March 5th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Omar,
I was probably being rather hyperbolic in my assertion that the network admin would be eliminated as the cloud takes over. But if we look at the case of a web application startup company these days, they scarcely require significant network expertise to get up and running. They would use Amazon’s cloud (i.e., EC2, S3) for hosting their application or perhaps Google App Engine. They could also use online collaboration, groupware tools instead of hosting a mail server. They could also use online storage instead of a local file server, and so on. If we are to follow Nicholas Carr in his assertion that the shift from the data center to the cloud is analogous to the shift from the local power generator to the electrical grid, we would conclude that the skills needed to run a data center today are not the skills that will be needed to operate a company’s IT assets tomorrow. So, I agree with you more than disagree with you. Positions will not be outright eliminated, rather the skills of today will be superseded by a different set of skills in the future and this is what the network/storage/server admins must prepare themselves for.
Prashanth Rao
Advanced Services – UCS
Cisco