Alternative remote access approaches

Traditional remote access, at least as we tend to think of it, is all designed around the needs of end users needing to use remote sessions as a replacement for their local desktop. As system administrators, it is great for us to be able to use those tools when they make sense for us, and it is necessary that we understand those tools because they are generally components that fall to us to administer, but for our own usage they may not be the most practical.

Of course, we can include most indirect remote access technologies under the heading of alternative remote access approaches, but they are basically just traditional access that has been tweaked to be more practical for our use cases. As administrators we want to reduce our logins or interactive sessions with remote machines in the hopes of removing that access completely, at least in an ideal world.

To this end, we have other methodologies today for running commands on our servers. There...