The cloud, whether private or public, says Sun VP Hal Stern, will change the nature of the system administrator's job, demanding a shift of emphasis from hardware and reliability to software. He shared his views with Alex Goldman in an interview for internetnews.com. "With services, we are leaving the hardware world," Stern said.

Goldman interpreted this to mean that system administrators will monitor the network and not its hardware components. "We still need sysadmins but we don't need them running around the datacenter with a socket wrench," he said. "Instead, they will use telemetry and tools to assess capacity, security, and performance."

In the cloud, Stern continued, applications can more easily be monitored and deployed, depending on a company's need, than in the traditional data center.

Stern suggested that IT will need to change how it thinks of assets in order to manage the coming multi-cloud infrastructure. Building on a recent blog post and speech, Stern said that infrastructure is now addressed through URLs and APIs and not through read and write commands.

Given that cloud applications can be built quickly, Stern contended, sysadmins will need to abandon their favorite equation -- MTBG/(MTBF + MTTR) "where MTBF is mean time between failure and MTTR is mean time to restart."

Stern told internetnews.com that the equation usually yielded a number with a lot of nines in it. He said that as administrators looked at the equation, they worried that all the downtime might come at once, or about how the equation would be affected if a server went down and stayed down for 50 minutes even just once during the year.

"So we bought hardware to lower the mean time to restart. We bought RAID and SAN and clusters," Stern said. "But software and deployment are also affecting reliability."

Instead, sysadmins need to measure service performance by tracking a series of KPIs that Stern called PIPE. "Sysadmins need to measure predictability, integrity, productivity, and efficiency (PIPE)," he said. He added that sysadmins will measure the efficiency of the datacenter in terms of throughput per dollar and work per watt.

Sysadmins will no longer need to track hardware performance in the cloud. "We do not see the underlying hardware even in the private cloud and we may not know what the hardware is in the public cloud," Stern maintained.

Rather than focus on mean time to reboot a server, Stern predicted, sysadmins will focus on time taken to recognize a problem. They will be purging old instances of an application and will be adding more instances if they need to. In the cloud, he said, a poor response time is virtually the same as failure.

Stern suggested a new mantra for sysadmins: "Remember: think 'recognize and restart' and not nines in terms of reliability," he concluded.

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