A cloud hangs over the sysadmin

I want to point everyone to some videos of Adam Jacob (Opscode) at Velocity 2010. He talks about sysops, webops, devops, etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx8OBeNmaWw

We as system administrators will never become obsolete as long as we continue to progress and develop our skills as technology evolves. This is no different than programmers learning to write code for this evolving technology.

People have been predicting things like this since the beginning of time. Outsourcing is going to kill software developers. Computers are going to write the software for us. Click-n-drag software development is going to kill software developers. And yet, somehow it never happens.

Do these reporters think that "cloud" services run on unicorn farts? Someone has to keep those services running. If anything, the "cloud" is likely to create more demand for sysadmins, since people are using more and more web-based applications.

"The IT job sector has been under increasing pressure. A couple of decades ago it was easy to imagine IT as a job for life, but outsourcing, offshoring and the dot-bomb brought wave upon wave of uncertainty to IT professionals.

The past couple of years have seen redundancies in all sectors including IT"

It's a gripping intro, but I'm just not sure it's true. The tech sectors in Silicon Alley / Valley are facing staffing shortages. The tech sector has been almost recession proof.

It's just a fluff angle to write a story about cloud computing.