Approaching systems administration as a discipline

IT systems administration encompasses a significant number of processes, operations, and tasks. Maintaining a fully operational system that has application and infrastructure components is an intense work effort.

Each component has its own level of importance in maintaining the overall reliability of the system, as well as a set of key administrative tasks to keep it healthy, available, and resilient, and ensure reasonable performance.

Also, how SREs undertake systems administration for cloud-native environments is very different from how they do the same for on-premises traditional workloads. IT resources’ virtualization levels have a huge say in which administration tasks are retained by SREs and which ones are solely the responsibility of the hyperscaler.

We will divide systems administration tasks into seven stages, following a system component life cycle:

• Design
• Installation
• Configuration
• App...