The Future of System Administration: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Self-Managing Systems

The profession of system administration is currently threatened by many forces, including self-managing products that seem to obsolete the system administrator, a lack of upward mobility paths for professional system administrators, and a growing trend toward outsourcing system administration and related tasks. In this talk, I explore how ongoing changes in the systems we manage can drive positive changes in the profession. The bad news is that the way we prepare system administrators today is woefully inadequate for managing the systems of the future, and we must also rise to the challenge by learning to interact with the systems we manage at a very different level than we are currently trained to do.

Alva L. Couch is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tufts. Prof. Couch is the author of many LISA papers, and received "best paper" awards in both 1996 and 2005. In 2003, he received the SAGE Professional Service Award for his contributions to the theory of system administration. He currently serves as Secretary of the USENIX Board of Directors.