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The author postulates that the cloud will automate away low-level IT jobs, comparing the situation to automation in manufacturing.
I've been saying for awhile now that we're getting close to a crisis point in the IT world. The mid-tier IT worker is in imminent danger of being automated out of existence, and just like with the vanished factory jobs of the last 30 years, nobody wants to admit it's happening until it's too late.
[...] So how do you know if your job is going to disappear into the cloud? You don't really need me to tell you. You already feel it in your bones. Repetition is a sure warning sign. If you're building the same integrations, patching the same servers over and over again every day, congratulations – you've already become a robot. It's only a matter of time before a small shell script makes it official.
The solution is simple, but not easy: you simply must keep moving. If you don't know how to code, learn - like planting a tree, the best time to start was ten years ago, but the second best time is now. If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup, something. Anything. At the end of the day, we're all self-taught engineers.
Otherwise, I'll tell you what will happen. The economy will take a small dip, or your department will get re-orged, and you will lose that job as an operations engineer on a legacy SaaS product. You'll look around for a similar job in your area and discover that nobody is hiring people anymore whose skill set is delivering a worse version of what AWS's engineers can do for a fraction of the cost. And by then you won't have the luxury of time to level up your skills.
I'm wondering how I craft an exit from this industry in the next handful of years.
https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/01/16/cloud-irregular-the-creeping-it-apocalypse/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:17PM (5 children)
Some of it will go away. From what I am currently seeing. Not much. In many ways 'the cloud' is in some ways, just as, if not more complex than before. The only benefit is I do not have a up front capex cost. But in the end the cost is about the same. I needed a set of kafka brokers. The cost for AWS per year was identical to just buying the hardware outright. You are renting computers. That is it. The cost will be slightly less long term. Very short term it can be great to try it out. But the mid term solution is not a good or bad price and borderline not worth screwing around with. Amazon has managed to bring back both the Sears model of shopping and IBMs model of renting computers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by vux984 on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:24AM (1 child)
" The cost for AWS per year was identical to just buying the hardware outright."
For some use cases. I'm not sure its true for a majority though. Most case studies I've done have found the cloud to be more expensive; sometimes considerably more expensive. The clients often went with the cloud anyway because it was 'simpler' that way, and they could focus on their core business instead of managing a more complicated onsite IT infrastructure; and it simplified outsourcing IT if there was no physical component to manage, etc.
And in other cases, the cloud was genuinely cheaper usually because onsite options lacked available internet bandwidth and there was no work around; or in some cases there simply was not enough space onsite to and resolve that can be extremely expensive.
But in a lot of cases especially when physical space and bandwidth aren't issues; the cost of buying a few servers and hosting your own VMs is a fraction of the price of equivalent Azure or AWS. Especially if you don't need all the bells and whistles; or you can tolerate a bit of down time...
You said it yourself... "You are renting computers. That is it. "
And renting is almost always much more expensive than buying in the long run. After all, nobody buys computers and rents them out just to "break even". There entire business model is to maximize how much more they can charge you to rent the computer than it cost them to buy it. If you think you can win by renting... I've got a bridge to
sellrent you.(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:16AM
Up front it has a nice advantage of you can spin some serious hardware up very quickly. To build something like a 10 machine cluster system locally could involve 6 months of purchasing and site work to 'do right'. But with AWS you can spin something like that faster. AWS has its use. But people need to understand that you probably will outgrow it if you stick around. Both on cost and security. Remember you do not own it. You are renting it. That makes sense in some cases. In others it makes 0 sense.
What I see these days is businesses doubling up the job of a dev into a sysadmin job. One dude I know just jumped jobs. Wicked good coder. He has spent the past 6 months configuring docker. A waste of talent. But these companies do not see that. They see the hardware has become code and need a dedicated dev to do it instead of 2-3 grunts. It is something where the low level is being eliminated but you need someone decently competent to manage it. Eventually they realize it when the 'good coder' walks because he is board out of his skull plugging together yml scripts.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:43AM
Your use case is not all the use case of AWS though. AWS also provides rent-an-ops not just rent-a-computer. For example AWS is starting to release managed mongodb and kafka services where you arent' t just renting infra and operating it yourself, you are also off-loading operational work to them (i.e. backups, archiving, patching, upgrades, sharding, capacity management, monitoring/alerting, etc.).
Depending on where you're located and how big your organization is, hiring operational smes to manage that could more expensive than off-loading it to AWS who has economies of scale.
Also, if you're starting to venture into these areas where you don't have the expertise, it provides a quick path to entry; at least from the operational side, you'd still need to invest in the development/functional side.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:21AM (1 child)
You conveniently forgot to factor in the human labor needed to manage actual hardware. That is to say, once your company fires you, those AWS instances will be a lot cheaper.
Blah blah third party support sucks, but when has that ever stopped a manager? And most cloud providers have SLAs for uptime.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @07:29PM
We left an Oracle service due to this factor. Support was inadequate and even management acknowledged this. So, it happens.