Situational Awareness and System Administration

Introductory Rant

It is sometimes hard to remember that much of what we see in ICT is  a re-interpretation or re-building of what we have done before. There is little in our modern landscape that was not done by the trailblazers in Mainframe, Mini and Unix domains. Whilst technology advances and Moore's Law makes us so mighty compared to what has gone before it is still interesting how much is a re-purposing.

There are still of course fundamental breakthroughs in Information Science and I would suggest some items:

• The building of scalable Map/Reduce approaches using parallelism to deal with massive Key/Value Pair Sets.
• The use of Graph Math to build Graph DBs and systems
• The addition of Polymorphism to the basic Sequence, Selection, Repetition and Recursion of Algorithm design
• The WIMPS GUI concepts that came spectacularly to life at XEROX PARC

These are serious advances in our basic approach to information.

We are now deep into the rebirth of the coder as System Administrator - with DevOPS approaches vastly improving how we scale, orchestration is king and many of the culture wars of the day around these approaches and the related Containerization and MicroServices are being hailed as a REVOLUTION.

Now these approaches do make us mighty but a revolution - that is just unmitigated poo!

• Scripting - every major OS post Babbage
• Cattle vs Pets - HPC folks must be on their fifth T-Shirt with that on it.
• Cloud - Bureau with Moore's Law and Internet on its side
• MicroServices - Go read Juliff on Structured Systems - Grrrr

What we are seeing is a Evolutionary change not a revolutionary one that doesn't make it less valuable or less startling in what folks are achieving. Google, Amazon, Azure and all the fellow travellers are causing us to rethink the enterprises strategic approach to ICT and that change is tectonic - it is as vast and uncharted as the PC revolution.

Its the strategy that changing and its leading us places in terms of building consumable things enterprises and individuals want in all sorts new ways, that's the step change not the technology or the rediscovery of command line and coding in system Administration.

Problem Statement

In all of this I see an interesting break point that I don't think is being adequately thought through - we are now coalescing so much capability, Voice, data, geolocation and goodness knows what else, that the systems have long since become the business. Despite this our ability to be able understand the state of these systems of systems is normally marginal to say the least.

Most Sys Admin teams would have seen their most senior Network folks struggle over multiple consoles and endless cryptic commands and logfiles to try to figure out why the network has decided to do a strange thing. It is painful to watch hugely clever people trying to correlate and understand so many disparate information flows to eventually get to the proof that "Its actually a server problem" :-)