IaaS , doing myself out of a job?

[Lanz]

A simple question, I've never administrated a cloud based VM infrastructure, so I don't know how involved it is.

As part of my job, I manage a few hundred VMs and their associated hardware. There's more and more talk of moving these VM's into vCloud Air or Azure. Would I be putting myself out of a job if I embraced this idea, or is there still a lot of tinkering and managing of workloads, tuning performance that still needs to be done to keep hundreds of VM's working nice?

I've seen these VMware cloud professional certs, but is managing an IaaS environment a real, technical role or do you just put your VM's out there and forget about them (and end up being made redundant?)

cheers

 

[gman1981]

Essentially I think it is just a case of not having any hardware on premise as such. But management etc is still required. Performance, settings etc would still be needed.

 

[Lanz]

I'd miss the hardware side for sure, I like server refresh time...

I'm guessing a big part of it would be squeezing max app performance out of each Mhz, as a lazy administrator might be using far more Ghz and RAM a year than they need.

I'd be interested to hear from someone who manages a big environment, to see what's really involved.

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

If you're already looking after and administering a fairly large estate of VMs then I think you'll be fine. IaaS gets rid of the management of wiring and bare metal aspects of service provision. What it doesn't get rid of is dealing with service failures of said wires and bare metal. You still need someone to diagnose the problem and open a ticket as well as figuring out how to correctly implement, maintain and upgrade services living in the cloud.

If your job is the wires and bare metal part of the process, you'll be out of the job. If your job is the administration, you can add a ton more complexity without worrying too much about the underlying infrastructure. From the company's perspective it's a lot easier to get someone with AWS experience than it is to get someone who has specific knowledge of your company's environment, so the risk of going IaaS is much lower.

tl;dr More time designing and keeping services running, less time tinkering with bits of tin.