Theoretically, if a company hosts all its custom development in a cloud, it would need less hardware, and thus, fewer sysadmins.
Sorry Todd, your theory is bad, but your conclusions are fine. I know because I’m in an org that is three years into an internal cloud system.
Systems administrators do not spend their days playing with hardware.
Now, this may be true in some humpty organizations that go cheap on the hardware, or stick their equipment in an unventilated closet next to the boiler. Most of us buy gear that will last and at least stick it in a space with a fan or two.
A component breaks, the system sends you email. You setup an appointment with the vendor, yank out the old part, shove in the new. It’s all hot-spare stuff so nobody is affected.
The days of having to obsess over hardware, having to babysit servers so they don’t melt are over.
What we do is deal with systems and how they interact with each other. Cloud does not reduce the complexity of those interactions, it makes them even more complex.
It requires a methodical mind, troubleshooting skills, a willingness to get out of one’s comfort zone, to synthesize. It requires - God help us - a system administrator who can code, for a lot of interactions are mediated by logic and scripts.
This is a change from the way things have been. Managing servers by hand, never a good idea, will be flat-out unsupportable. Guys who even try that will be fired for incompetence.
We saw a similar change over about the time that the title ‘LAN Administrator’ went extinct. People who made comfortable livings running a LAN for a department or two (Think NetWare 3) suddenly had to operate at the organization level. If they couldn’t they found employment elsewhere. Your LAN team went from a herd of guys to a small team.
As the LAN Administrator of 1998, so goes the system administrator of 2010. In the future there will be less of them, they’ll manage more ‘stuff’, they’ll be more skilled than their run-of-the-mill peer today.