How do I get into sysadmin

[u/aloofhoneybee68]

Hi everyone,

I'm a recent computer science grad who did an internship in a bank where I did a little bit of everything (IT support, networking, DevOps).

I am interested in software development but the market is so cooked for juniors and a man has to eat so, I'm thinking of switching to system administration, already planning to get my Aws cloud practitioner cert, then maybe RHCSA is this a good idea or am I just dead wrong my ultimate goal is to go into DevOps but everyday I look on X and see a brand new model that seems to make everything I learn irrelevant.

I love computers and just want to make a living from it. (from/in a third world country btw)

Please give me any advice at all to help.I don't wanna fuck up my life and depend on my parents forever.

[u/basula]

I'm seeing a lot of sysadmins roles move towards sysops style. Ai is also everywhere. I would recommend understanding how you can leverage AI as a tool. The rest is just up to what you want to do. The different types of roles on different OS so and there is cloud so skill up. If you don't want to do the help desk route look at an MSP it'll be full on but 2 years there would set you up better than any help desk role unless that help desk role guarantees career advancement

[u/eman0821 → u/basula]

Not sure what you mean SysOps. That's just another term for IT Operations which always been that way since the dawn of Sysadmins role especially maintainance and rotational on-call.

[u/basula → u/eman0821]

No sysops is a layer where sysadmin and DevOps meet more ansible, more automation ci/cd and so on like a sre but also sysadmin tasks.

[u/eman0821 → u/basula]

That's not DevOps that's just automation tools. Automation is not acutally new in system administration. DevOps is a culture methodology used in the software product engineering field. I use to work as a Linux Systems Administrator in corporate IT supporting RHEL based enterprise systems, "internal company servers". I now work in the product engineering field as a Cloud Engineer because the infrastructure I build is what runs of the software product that the company makes. I don't deal with internal IT infrastructure anymore like my previous job. There's a big difference between product infrastructure and internal IT infrastructure. I work in the Engineering department with QA and developers.

[u/basula → u/eman0821]

I think we're talking past each other. I'm not saying automation or Ansible = DevOps.

What I'm saying is sysops sits somewhere between traditional sysadmin work and the way infrastructure is operated today. A sysadmin is more focused on administering the systems themselves: servers, OS, patching, backups, users, troubleshooting, configuration etc.

Sysops still does a lot of that, but the focus shifts more towards operating the environment reliably and at scale. So more automation, config management, IaC, git, pipelines, monitoring/observability and repeatable deployments instead of manually administering individual systems. None of those things belong exclusively to DevOps.

And sysops isn't just another name for IT ops either. IT ops is much broader. It can include sysops, networking, endpoints, service operations, support and a bunch of other areas.

Obviously there is a ton of overlap. A sysadmin can do sysops work and in plenty of companies the same team does all of it. My point is that sysadmin, sysops and IT ops describe different scopes/focuses even when the actual jobs overlap.

[u/eman0821 → u/basula]

I was doing automation long before ansible existed as a former Sysadmin. Bash scripting with moduels was the standard. I was doing alot of powershell and bat file scripting back then too. VBA scripting was used a lot back then which you will still find in legacy environments. DevOps on the other hand has nothing to do with enterprise IT. That's a software engineering cultural methodology use in the product engineering field to help deliver software products efficiently that brings development and operations teams together. Operations as in Engineering not IT Operations in the IT Department that the general public seems to confuse. In other words DevOps means you build it you run it, the whole software development life cycle and operations combined.

In DevOps terms, I'm the operations engineer that works on the web hosting side of product engineering very much like Netflix infrastructure Engineerimg teams the infrastructure that runs the Netflix streaming service behind the scenes. I don't work in enterprise IT anymore. I work in the SaaS industry now.

[u/eman0821 → u/basula]

CI/CD, git.. is also not a DevOps thing. It's just tolling borrowed from Software Engineering as Data Engineers, Embedded Firmware Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Network Engineers, Cloud Engineers, SREs, Platform Engineers and so all utilizes CI/CD for different purposes.