opsschool-curriculum/sysadmin_101.rst

Sysadmin 101
************

*System Administration* is the blanket title for a myriad of job
responsibilities involving the management of information systems and/or
services. We choose to refer to it as a "blanket title" because the
responsibilities are broad and can differ from organization to organization.
In some organizations, it even differs from group to group!

System Administration is often referred to as "operations" or "ops" too - you
might have guessed that though, having decided to enroll in Ops School.

Like almost everything in this world, system administration does not exist in
a vacuum. There are two other groups of people that exist to make
an information system or service come together: developers and customers.
Customers are often referred to end-users or people or humans - basically,
they're the folks you're implementing a system or service for.

A system administrator experiences life in all three of these roles: sometimes
you will be tasked with maintaining a system or service, and sometimes you
may be developing parts of a system. Many times, you'll be someone else's
customer.

This section will get into what system administrators (ops) professionals do,
what developers do, where they compare and contrast, what role that ops plays
in the larger business context, a mindset and approach to systems administration,
demonstrate the importance of problem solving and ethics in the every day
life of a system administrator.

.. _whats-sysadmin:

What is Systems Administration?
===============================

Like we mentioned above, the role of the System Administrator is diverse.

To illustrate some of the latitude present in the role, consider how the
following descriptions compare and contrast:

.. _whats-sysadmin-matt:

* **Matt works for an elementary school.** He's referred to by other employees at
  the school as the system administrator. To the other employees, Matt ensures
  that the computers "just work." Realistically, Matt spends time making sure
  that the systems that everyone uses are patched - to avoid security issues.
  Other employees talk to him
  about software they may need installed -- on their computer, or maybe all of
  them! Matt also has the responsibility of making sure that the school's
  website is available for parents to get information on, and that the classroom
  management software is up and running and accepting requests. Matt also needs
  to be able to look into the future and figure out how much space the employees
  may need on the server, and be able to justify that to his boss. When report
  card time runs around, Matt has to make sure that the teachers are able to
  give their report cards out on time.

.. _whats-sysadmin-sarah:

* **Sarah works for a large website that many people use on a day to day basis.**
  Downtime is a big deal for this website: after all, when the site is down,
  people aren't spending money. When these problems occur, Sarah gets paged to
  determine the root cause of the issue and respond. Fortunately for Sarah she's
  not always being paged. During the normal day-to-day operations of the site,
  Sarah writes various scripts and programs that help her other administrators
  manage the site on a day to day basis, and strives to reduce the amount of
  "manual" tasks that the team she's on has to deal with.

.. _whats-sysadmin-will:

* **Will works for a small town.** The town has 35 employees who use computers
  every day, and they need access to email and other collaboration tools. With
  so many services and options for e-mail, which one makes the most amount of
  sense for the town? Daniel collects input from the employees about what
  capabilities are important, input from legal council about what laws a town
  must follow regarding electronic communication, and evaluates a few
  services or products with his user's needs in mind along with the town's. If he
  ends up using a third-party service, he'll have to figure out how to roll it
  out to the users. If Will chooses to host himself, he'll have to coordinate
  getting the appropriate infrastructure set up to make sure that it can meet
  the capacity of the users. He'll also need to set it all up.

.. _whats-sysadmin-karen:

* **Karen works for a large business.** The business has many groups, but she
  works with one set of users - hardware engineers. She maintains a network that
  they use to run their hardware simulations before the hardware goes out to be
  built. She regularly writes scripts to reduce the number of manual steps
  something takes - like adding new users to the system. She also has to
  coordinate how the network will be patched regularly, what investments will be
  required for the network to continue operating at peek performance, and work
  with the other administrators to create something that works for the engineers
  at the business.

.. _whats-sysadmin-darren:

* **Darren works for a large financial company.** The company has many teams that
  do different things, but there's collaboration between the different system
  administrators - the operations team (staffed with administrators) implements
  things that the research team (also administrators) recommends based on the
  needs of the business. They work with developers too - since the financial
  company has a lot of custom software that is written by the developers. The
  developers have different goals when they write their software - so they meet
  with Darren and his team to make sure they understand the context surrounding
  where and how their application will run, and to make sure that Darren's team
  knows what they need as well. Darren's team may have ideas about what
  statistics are important to monitor.

.. _whats-sysadmin-chris:

* **Chris works for a consultancy.** The company has many clients for which it
  provides software development and operations support. Every client has their
  own infrastructure, their own requirements - some of them very similar
  to the previous examples, some very different. Therefore, Chris needs to be
  familiar with a wide range of technologies, in addition to being able to
  learn new things quickly. There's a lot of variety in the day-to-day job.
  While it's not his primary responsibility to write code, sometimes the job
  calls for it - where context has already determined the implementation
  language. Chris works closely not only with the clients but also with his
  developer coworkers and the rest of the operations team to meet client goals.
  In addition, Chris also works with the rest of the operations team to support
  the consultancy's own infrastructure.

.. _whats-sysadmin-comparing-stories:

Comparing Stories
-----------------
Did you notice any themes throughout the stories? How do they contrast?

Highlighted themes include:

* **System Administrators rarely work on their own.** Some of the stories
  feature System Administrators who are the only "Information Technology" staff
  in their organization - but it's a requirement for them to work with everyone
  - the folks who "sign the paycheck at the end of the day," *and* the people
  who use their technology.
* **System Administration can be difficult if you don't automate!** Imagine if
  Matt had to install a software package on 200 machines by walking to each
  machine and installing it? How could he get any of his other requests done?
* **At times, the system administrator may need to write code.**
  Maybe that means a script that can take a list of users and add them to a
  system, maybe that means a script that can check to make sure a service is
  responding appropriately for a monitoring system.
* **System Administration means a lot of *different* things to a lot of people.** The other
  non-IT employees are looking for something that "just works" - the ops
  person is concerned with proper implementation of a service so it continues
  to be scalable and reliable for the future.

.. _whats-dev:

What is Development?
====================
As mentioned in the section introduction, system administration doesn't exist
in a vacuum. Computers don't just compute for the sake of it - not yet,
anyways.

*Developers* write applications in a variety of programming languages to
make a computer do *something*. Developers created the backend that allows you
to order a book on a site like Amazon.com, post a status on Facebook, or
research a topic in a literary journal database.

These backends can be big, and have a many considerations behind their design.

.. todo:

TODO: Section needs more developer perspective.

.. _constrasting-devandops:

Contrasting Development and Operations
======================================
At the end of the day, both groups have an important shared goal: to ensure that a
system or service remains as *available* (think: accessible, usable, works how people expect it to)
as a customer expects it to be. You'll see references to the idea of how "available" a system or service
is later when Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are discussed.

That being said, Development and Operations have different day-to-day thoughts.

Operations thoughts include:

* How are we going to install (or, deploy) the servers that run this application?

* How will we monitor the system/service to make sure it's working as we expect?

* Can we deploy this system or service in a way that is easy to maintain?

* What are the pros/cons of implementing this application in this way?

Development thoughts include:

* How will I implement message passing between two parts of this application?

* What's the best algorithm to use for searching through this amount of data?

* Should I be thinking of a key-value store for this data vs. using a relational database?

* What language will I implement this in?

Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list - entire books could be written
about the subject. It's just to give a feel for the different considerations.

History of Development and Operations
=====================================
Historically, Developers made a product or application and Operations implemented it. Some
companies still use this model today. Unfortunately, the effects of
this style of work can be dangerous:

* **Developers and Operations personnel may have different goals.** Something
  important to the operations folk may not be important to the Development
  folk.
* **Siloing these two organizations means that the most important goal of
  service availability is compromised.** The person who is using your program
  or service doesn't care who made a mistake, the service is down.
* **Speaking of mistakes:** when companies don't encourage their development and
  operations teams to work together, it's possible that groups get too invested
  in assigning blame, instead of working together to fix an issue

Fortunately, recent companies there has been more effort on ensuring that both
teams are familiar with the concepts of the other - this is often referred to
as "DevOps" - the combination of Development and Operations. Recall
":ref:`Darren's story <whats-sysadmin-darren>`" - he's an operations
person who worked with the developers to ensure that the developers understand
the environment that their application will run on. The street went both ways, though:
the developers need to share how they plan to implement various product features
so that the operations team can figure out how to best support the developers needs.

If you're working in an environment without developers, that's OK. There are
other people who you share a common, larger goal with. Businesses may have
analysts that interpret needs and look to you for assistance. In
":ref:`Karen's story <whats-sysadmin-karen>`," she supports hardware engineers who have requirements
to deliver a particular sensor. Their ability to work hinges on Karen's ability
to deliver a service for simulation that is available for them to work, which
requires an understanding of their requirements and needs as well.

.. _whats-not-sysadmin:

What is System Administration Not?
==================================

* Professional Roadblock ("No-Men")

The role of the SysAdmin in the organization
============================================

* "Who is that guy? Why is he always muttering about 'latency'?"
* Understanding the greater role of delivering a service for a business

Mindset and approach
====================

Generalists vs Specialists
--------------------------

Problem Solving
===============

Learning Styles - Ways to improve skill set
-------------------------------------------

Methodologies for finding solutions
-----------------------------------

Ethics
======
* LOPSA ethics statement/SAGE(now LISA) ethics statement?

Where to draw the line
----------------------

Keeping yourself safe from yourself
-----------------------------------