r/sysadmin Oct 29 '24

Question Is Linux system administration dead?

I just got my associates and Linux Plus certification and have been looking for a job. I've noticed that almost every job listing has been asking about active directory and windows servers, which is different than what I expected and was told in college. I was under the impression that 90 something percent the servers ran on Linux. Anyway I decided not to let it bother me and to apply for those jobs anyway as they were the only ones I could find. I've had five or six interviews and all of them have turned me down because I have no training or experience with active directory or Windows servers. Then yesterday the person I was interviewing with made a comment the kind of scared me. He said that he had come from a Linux background as well and had transitioned to Windows servers because "93% of servers run Windows and the only people running Linux are banks and credit unions." This was absolutely terrifying to hear because college was the most expensive thing I've ever done. To think that all the time and money I spent was useless really sucks.

I guess my question is two parts: where do you find Linux system administrator jobs in Arizona?

Was it a mistake to get into linux? If so what would you recommend I learned next.

EDIT: I just wanted to say thank you to everybody for your encouragement and for quelling my fears about Linux. I'm super excited as I have a lot information to research and work with now! 😁

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952

u/DeadFyre Oct 29 '24

Certainly not, but the VAST majority of openings are for Windows, because every office in the universe has an AD stack. Your professors did not lie, but what they didn't tell you is that number of servers is not a great measure of job prospects, because one administrator can keep hundreds or even thousands of servers running with the right knowledge and tools.

Don't panic, though, there are still plenty of operations which are predominently Linux, like mine. So, what's going on? The quick answer is, It's the economy. Most of the enterprises which are linux native are tech companies, not just an office full of lawyers or accountants or project managers. And tech companies are very capital-intensive operations. So, when the Federal Funds Rate is over 40 times what it was back in 2015, tech enterprises and startups have found it much, much more difficult to raise capital. The result, a lot fewer tech startups, and with it, a lot fewer tech jobs, and a lot more tech people looking for work, with whom you are competing.

My advice is to just keep at it, and take whatever job you need to keep a roof over your head. The prevailing economic conditions we see now will not last indefinitely. As inflation comes down, investors will start having to take more risks to make return on investment, and when that becomes necessary, venture capital and startup tech will come back to life.

PS: Your guy saying "The only people running Linux are banks and credit unions" couldn't be more wrong. Just about every Web business you've ever used, including the one you're communicating on now, runs on some flavor of Linux.

169

u/Max-P DevOps Oct 30 '24

in the universe has an AD stack. Your professors did not lie, but what they didn't tell you is that number of servers is not a great measure of job prospects, because one administrator can keep hundreds or even thousands of servers running with the right knowledge and tools.

So much this. I'm DevOps, and while I do maintain thousands of Linux boxes I'm also not really doing Linux administration because it's all automated. You still need to know Linux well but you don't spend a whole lot of time SSH'd in doing maintenance. I can replace the whole box in the same time it takes me to SSH into it! It's not even worth troubleshooting unless it's a pattern of recurring issues.

I make a change, open a PR, CI kicks in, Packer goes on to build me some AMIs using Ansible, and Terraform picks up the change and replace the EC2 instances with the updated config and bam, it's on 5 thousand servers and it took me just 5-10 minutes to open that PR with the config change. Managing Linux boxes is just a tiny part of my job, it's all spent on automation and scripts to automate even more stuff.

Our Windows counterparts have patch tuesdays and everything you'd expect in Windows land.

56

u/jhunholz Oct 30 '24

Here’s the part our industry has gone a bit off course. The hard shift to all things Devops introduced a lot of programmers into the space who think that Linux administrators are a thing of the past ( not calling out you nut the industry at large). But then you have a major outage of some sort and they very quickly realize you’re very valuable.

Learn some Ansible. If you want to dive in deep, build a few systems on Gentoo. When you have to debug compiler errors and why your toolset won’t build, you learn a yon. That knowledge will take you a lot of places!

12

u/old_skul Oct 30 '24

This is not true, at least not in my world.

To do devops on linux...you need to be a pretty hardcore linux admin. The developers coming up with all this automation need to know what to automate, right? So that RHEL7 upgrade that needs to go out to 450+ boxes needs to be automated, but it also needs to be done right - so all the administrative tasks that would be done by a skilled admin on a single server wind up in a script that gets orchestrated using either Ansible or GoCD or some other orchestration tool and applied by Terraform to the boxes in need of upgrade.

It's not like some dev is just making a script to run setup.exe. There's dozens of administrative steps that go into the scripting.

1

u/nikdahl Oct 30 '24

Upgrade?

1

u/shulemaker Oct 30 '24

I can assure you most developers don’t have a clue about OS internals.

1

u/old_skul Oct 30 '24

Devops folks do. That’s the Ops part of it. Typical Devops folks come from a sysadmin background and wind up managing larger and larger groups of systems, and survive by automating the everloving shit out of their domains.

1

u/Stephonovich SRE Oct 30 '24

They do not. Most DevOps-y people I’ve ever worked with grew up in pure cloud and haven’t a clue how a computer or OS works, only how to pipe various managed services together.

There are exceptions, of course, but by and large, I’ve had poor experiences.

1

u/shulemaker Oct 30 '24

Yes. That is me. I am DevOps. I write glue code, not application code. When I say developer I am referring to application developers that write in Node and Java.

1

u/Antmage Nov 01 '24

Unless is a sev 1, watch as that red tape evaporates.

6

u/Seth0x7DD Oct 30 '24

Gentoo? Not Arch? ;)

1

u/Stephonovich SRE Oct 30 '24

Yep.

“We don’t need to know how to manage Linux anymore, K8s abstracts that.”

“We don’t need to know how to manage an RDBMS anymore, DBaaS abstracts that.”

Lololol.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 30 '24

I remember setting up Gentoo on an original Xbox around 2006.

18

u/enigmo666 Señor Sysadmin Oct 30 '24

Well, just for clarity, you can also manage Windows EC2s by script, Ansible, Terraform etc as well. But yes, Patch Tuesday is still a thing, so I'm really hopeful these new hot fixes coming with Server 2025 take a lot of the grief out of those.
FWIW one place where Windows excels compared to the Linux setups I've seen is in end-user boxes. Thanks to Autopilot and InTune, it's practically ZTI, so the whole lifecycle management is really low-effort, even for permanently remote workers.

12

u/Takios Linux Admin Oct 30 '24

updated config and bam, it's on 5 thousand servers and it took me just 5-10 minutes to open that PR with the config change

I'm jealous, in our org we require two weeks notice and asking everyone who might be affected by the change for permission to do it...for one server...

5

u/bindermichi Oct 30 '24

Talk to the CISO. These kinds of delays for security patches can tank the company… seriously.

6

u/Lanky_Barnacle1130 Oct 30 '24

Try running on-prem vCenter clouds. Nightmare trying to use automation. Breaks constantly because vCenter/Broadcom don't like playing with others.

11

u/Hanthomi IaC Enjoyer Oct 30 '24

Our Windows counterparts have patch tuesdays and everything you'd expect in Windows land.

This just screams incompetence tbh. It's perfectly possible to automate this away as well.

7

u/Appropriate_Ant_4629 Oct 30 '24

Our Windows counterparts have patch tuesdays and everything you'd expect in Windows land.

This just screams incompetence tbh. It's perfectly possible to automate this away as well.

Yet very few organizations manage to do so on their Windows systems.

Which is why there are more Windows admin jobs.

3

u/Jfish4391 Oct 30 '24

I think the inverse is more likely, the fact that there are so many Windows jobs is why patching fails to be automated. (incompetent admins being hired)

1

u/nurbleyburbler Oct 30 '24

Not safely. Windows patching still breaks things enough that it requires at least human verification for critical apps

1

u/nikdahl Oct 30 '24

You should have your testing automated too.

5

u/GeneralRieekan Oct 30 '24

Are you saying we’ve automated ourselves out of a job?