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As system administrators, we deal with a variety of issues, problems, and tasks that face us on a regular basis. Our managers ask us to solve problems with fewer staff. They ask us to "make do" with underpowered systems. Our executives expect longer hours at the same pay rates. And we have to deal with training our replacements or be denied our severance packages. But all the trials and tribulations that have plagued us for the past 15 years could easily escalate if the trend for greater automation continues.
Imagine a system that intelligently heals itself, restarts its own services, monitors its own health, alerts itself to its own problems, acquires its own patches and updates, installs its own software, reboots itself, and self-generates its own reports (conveniently in Excel format) to be gathered by another automated system that crunches the data and distills it into easy-to-read charts, graphs, and color-coded statuses. These technologies are not far away, Of course, even the smoothest-running automated artificially intelligent system will require a few of us to tweak and jump-start a failed process every now and then, but you might find that one admin is managing many more systems than before.
We system administrators are not entirely blameless in this trend toward more automation. For years we have automated repetitive tasks, passed off the low-level work to junior administrators, offshored the undesirable work, and come up with new ways to avoid hitting the keyboard. I once created an entire performance status reporting system that was fully automated. Each day the reports were ready for the administrators. Each month the databases truncated and archived themselves, and new ones were created with scripts timed perfectly to do what used to take me hours.
Yes, I was proud of myself for my "scripting magic," but little did I know the full ramifications of those actions. What once took me a full day, every day to
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