[BBLISA] January BBLISA Mtg: Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped

[John P. Rouillard]

Hi Everybody:

Our speaker for January 13th will be Thomas A. Limoncelli, SRE at
StackOverflow.com.

The title of his talk is:

Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped

Transactional system administration puts sysadmins in a bad
position. When organizations replace this model with a service-centric
model the company receives better service and sysadmins gain positive
visibility and increase their value.

The transactional model is where customers make requests and system
administrators fulfill them. It is the model of servitude. This has
been the power dynamic for decades. The service-centric model is where
sysadmins maintain the automation that does work rather than doing the
work themselves. Another way to look at it is that the best use of
human labor in an auto factory is not to build cars, but to maintain
the robots that build cars.

Stack Exchange's SRE Team is making strides at minimizing
transactional system administration and, instead, adopting DevOps
practices that create a cooperative relationship with our users. We've
adopted this as our guiding management principle and it has greatly
improved how we get things done.

Tom will discuss the successes and failures of these attempts and
recommend how your organization can adopt this better structure.

Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system
administrator. His new book, The Practice of Cloud System
Administration, launched last year. His past books include Time
Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of
System and Network Administration (Pearson). In 2005, he received the
USENIX LISA Outstanding Achievement Award. He works in New York City
at Stack Exchange, home of Careers.Stackoverflow.com, and previously
worked at Google and Bell Labs. His blog is
http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom.

He will be speaking at MIT E-51, Room 145 on January 13 2016.

7:00 - Announcements & Introductions
7:30 - Formal presentation

Hope to see you there.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.