This document compares and contrasts the roles of system administrators (sysadmins) and DevOps engineers. It discusses that sysadmins are primarily focused on installing, configuring, and maintaining operating systems, software, and company products on local servers and PCs. DevOps engineers, on the other hand, work with cloud platforms, APIs, infrastructure as code, automation tools, and focus on monitoring through tools like Elasticsearch and Prometheus. It also provides examples of how sysadmins and DevOps engineers differ in their approaches to configuration management, monitoring, and debugging infrastructure issues.

1. Marian Marinov - mm@yuhu.biz
Head of Devops - Siteground.com
SysAdminsSysAdmins
vs.vs.
DevOpsDevOps
Dev.bg 12.May.2020

2. Dev.bg 12.May.2020

3. Dev.bg 12.May.2020

4. Dev.bg 12.May.2020

5. Dev.bg 12.May.2020

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Short assumption
Installation, configuration and maintainence of:
> operating systems
> additional software
> company products
> and their third­party dependencies

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The machines

8. 8
Sysadmins?
­ Local PCs and network equipment
­ Locally positioned servers
­ Dedicated or Co­Located servers in a DC
­ VMs on physical/dedicated/co­located
servers

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DevOps?
­ GCP
­ AWS
­ DigitalOcean
­ and even on premise, private clouds

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DevOps tools
­ OpenStack
­ OpenShift
­ Kubernetes
­ LXD
­ Docker
­ even Proxmox ☺

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Sysadmin tools
­ kickstart file
­ Fully Automatic Installation (FAI)
­ Cobbler
­ Spacewalk
­ OpenQRM
­ Foreman

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Sysadmin attachments
­ installing machines
­ managing configuration
­ doing routine maintenance tasks

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DevOps attachments
­ APIs
­ complex solutions
­ infrastructure as code

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Cloud vs. on prem
considerations

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Configuration management

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Syadmin ­ configuration
­ syncing files between machines with scp
­ backing up files on a separate machine
­ or tools like csync2
­ even keeping a git repo with the configs
A script that will do backups.
A script that will sync them to a new
machine.

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Devops ­ configuration
Using automation tools like:
­ Ansible
­ Chef
­ Puppet
­ Saltstack
Configuration in the format required by
the tool.
Changes to the tool to meet the
requirements.

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Configuration updates
Sysadmins tend to use things like echo and
sed to update configuration files
DevOps relay on what is offered by the
tool they are using

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Configuration updates
Example:
sed ­i 's/82.31.48.12/84.13.4.6/g'
/etc/apache/sites­available/*
­ hosts: all
tasks:
­ name: Change the IP of the httpd
replace:
path: /etc/apache/sites­available/*
regexp: '82.31.48.12'
replace: "84.13.4.6"

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Monitoring

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Monitoring
Sysadmins are overly attached to:
­ shell scripts and e­mail notifications
­ Nagios
­ Cacti/Mrtg
­ RRDtool generated graphs
DevOps poeple perefer:
­ Elastic Search + LogStash + Kibana
­ Graphana
­ Prometheus
­ even InfluxDB

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Debugging your infrastructure
Provisioning of a VM in AWS has failed
vs.
Provisioning of a VM in on srvX failed
(the server may be in a DataCenter somewhere)

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DevOps Debugging
* bug in the provisioning software
* problem with the configuration
* incorrect credentials
* network issue
And this is even before checking the logs
from your infrastructure provider

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Sysadmin Debugging
* connect to the problematic server
* check if all required services are
running
* check the logs for the problem
Most probably, does not have logs from the
calls/ssh to the server :)

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