I have been reading and following about the future of DBA and Sysadmins jobs role in an enterprise where cloud computing is used.<\/p>\n
So when an enterprise start using cloud does that mean that company does not require any more DBAs to look after Disaster Recovery and Performance issues. In the same way do they also Sysadmins to manage Operating systems and other issues with the server.<\/p>\n
In my\u00a0opinion DBAs and Sysadmins still required in an Enterprise<\/p>\n
Lets assume this way there are 2 big players providing Data Services in cloud. 1) Microsoft 2) Amazon<\/p>\n
but those Cloud Service providers provide only infrastructure to run computing cycles.
\nthey will not provide any service towards tuning your database or reducing CPU cycles on those queries in fact the worst code and worst queried will bring money for them because customers pay for their usage on CPU cycles and Data storage etc.<\/p>\n
I feel DBA job will continue to be there but DBAs will have to manage the cost cutting on bills which corporate gets on monthly basis for the database server.In simple words we buy electricity from utility company we pay monthly based on usage at the same time some one at home will take lead to save the energy at home or office to cut the cost to make sure they get less bill from utility company. The same way if there is no DBA a corporate will spend more money on CPU cycles and Datastorage. This process will create value for DBAs as the cost cutters who will looks after each query which was getting executed in the cloud to minimize the monthly bill from service provider.<\/p>\n
I strongly agree with the article written by Brent Ozar \u00a0 Long Live DBA<\/span><\/p>\n Jason Massie (aka StatisticsIO.com) wrote a blog post this week called\u00a0The Death of the DBA<\/a>.\u00a0 He talks about why the coming cloud computing craze creates career chaos.<\/p>\n I have the exact opposite opinion: I can\u2019t wait for databases to move toward the cloud because it makes database administrators even more vital.<\/p>\n When you move your database into the cloud, your cloud vendor starts billing you on a per-month basis for CPU time, memory, and storage space.\u00a0 Normally, when DBAs say they cut costs for a company, they\u2019re talking about funny money: if we optimize indexes and cut storage space by 10%, we don\u2019t suddenly get cash back.\u00a0 When software is a service, though, we will see real savings, a real reduction in our next monthly cloud bill.<\/p>\n Cloud vendors won\u2019t get involved in tuning indexes, cutting storage space, optimizing memory and cleaning up CPU cycles because they make money off bad application design and bad production decisions.\u00a0 Want to make a bunch of duplicate indexes on your Amazon EC2-hosted MySQL server?\u00a0 Knock yourself out \u2013 Amazon\u2019s happy to let you do it, and they make more money off every bad decision.\u00a0 Go long enough without a DBA, and the applications will start racking up big monthly bills.<\/p>\n How many of us have been shafted when some kind of third party provider suddenly closed up shop in the middle of the night and disappeared?\u00a0 Think back to the online storage craze in the initial dot-com boom: everybody and their brother was offering online storage space for free or for cheap.\u00a0 Some of the providers are still around, but most of them folded up and died, taking user data along with them.<\/p>\n Disaster recovery no longer just means preparing for your own business failures: with cloud computing, it means preparing for the failures of your cloud vendor too.\u00a0 No cloud vendor is too big to experience problems: check out the\u00a0Amazon S3 outage in July 2008<\/a> and the\u00a0Amazon S3 outage in February 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n Web sites have been hosted at third party hosting providers for more than a decade, but try calling your hosting company and getting good help with a problem.<\/p>\n I just recently chatted with a sysadmin who sat through a grueling contract renegotiation with their hosting provider.\u00a0 They\u2019re spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on hosting, and the hosting provider touted all kinds of advantages like redundant internet connections across multiple datacenters.\u00a0 Come to find out \u2013 they only had a single datacenter, and were thinking about growing to another one.\u00a0 The hosting provider also mentioned that they had the right to move machines between datacenters at any time without warning as part of planned maintenance windows.<\/p>\n Without a skilled sysadmin, these unfortunate problems wouldn\u2019t have come to light, and the poor client would have only found out when their machines went down and came back up with new IP addresses.\u00a0 This is a huge security risk for the client, who has to pay external security auditing firms to verify that their private data is in good hands.\u00a0 They would have to redo their security audits and fork out big bucks.<\/p>\n Does third party hosting solve solutions and offer value?\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 But does it eliminate the need for administration, security auditing, day to day maintenance, planning, and app design?\u00a0 No way.<\/p>\n Say three companies came out right now offering SQL Server hosting services:<\/p>\n Your company has to evaluate each hosting option, and the larger you get, the more sense Company A makes.\u00a0 At a certain number of databases, you\u2019ll save money by doing the management yourself.<\/p>\n Company C can\u2019t offer management features without paying for DBAs.\u00a0 The DBAs have to work somewhere, and you can bet that Company C will heavily mark up their DBA costs because everybody has to make money somehow.<\/p>\n I did a short stint at a major financial firm who wouldn\u2019t even allow their employees to get their email over the web.\u00a0 Imagine putting their financial data on databases in \u201cthe cloud\u201d \u2013 no way.\u00a0 Private companies might be able to get away with it, but after a couple of security scares (think lost tape backups) the paranoia will set in.<\/p>\n I can already visualize the ads for consulting companies.\u00a0 \u201cThink your data is safe in the cloud?\u00a0 How do you know Mr. Hacker Guy isn\u2019t connecting a USB drive to your server right now?\u00a0 Pay us and we\u2019ll find out.\u201d<\/p>\n The good DBAs I know don\u2019t work in the datacenter (except when it\u2019s time for OS reinstalls, and these days a lot of that is handled with imaging and deployment tools).\u00a0 They work from a cubicle, office, or coffeeshop miles away from their servers.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have to put our hands on the servers, and they could be anywhere.\u00a0 I\u2019d love for my databases to move to the cloud, because it makes it easier to justify telecommuting.\u00a0 Preferably from a beach.\u00a0 With margaritas.\u00a0 (Might be able to expense those during meetings, too.)<\/p>\n Now is a great time to be a DBA, and while I think there are disruptive computing forces on the horizon, I don\u2019t think the cloud is going to put an end to the DBA career.<\/p>\n So what about the future is going to change the DBA career in say, five or ten years?\u00a0 Well, as RAM and solid state disks get cheaper, I can foresee the day where databases run entirely in memory and just back up to disk.\u00a0 Performance tuning becomes less of an issue, and we get to focus on functionality instead of the number of bytes an index will take.<\/p>\n Think back ten years ago in general computing & programming: people were still writing programs in assembly because they needed the speed.\u00a0 Now, raw speed of an app isn\u2019t as much of an issue for general programmers and they get to focus on which cool new language will make the programming faster, not the code execution.<\/p>\n To me, that\u2019s really cool and exciting.\u00a0 It means in a few years, we might be able to do more data mining and predictive analysis with even the most basic, everyday databases.\u00a0 I might be able to say, \u201cMan, remember when we had to worry about the number of indexes on a table?\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 Yesterday sucked.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s awesome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been reading and following about the future of DBA and Sysadmins jobs role in an enterprise where cloud…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-related","category-future","category-i-read-on-internet","category-personal","wpcat-7-id","wpcat-10-id","wpcat-8-id","wpcat-9-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":624,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions\/624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Reason #1: Cloud computing costs real money, and DBAs can help cut costs.<\/h4>\n
Reason #2: Disaster recovery becomes even more important.<\/h4>\n
Reason #3: Web hosting hasn\u2019t killed the need for sysadmins.<\/h4>\n
Reason #4: The economy of scale means it can be cheaper to manage your own servers.<\/h4>\n
\n
Reason #5: Security & SOX compliance.<\/h4>\n
Reason #6: Do you stand next to your servers now?<\/h4>\n
Bottom Line: The cloud is coming, but it\u2019s not going to rain on the DBA party.<\/h4>\n