For anyone working in a traditional sysadmin role, automation — and a larger DevOps conversation — can be disconcerting. Modern automation means “code” and some sysadmins insist coding is outside their job descriptions. In fact, when I was an IT director, I had a sysadmin tell me, “We don’t code.” He was content with maintaining golden images and tweaking those VMs as problems arose.
But the idea of infrastructure as code or policy as code doesn’t have to be frightening. In fact, for anyone used to shelling into hundreds of on-prem or cloud instances, even a little bit of coding can go a long way toward making life easier.