Isn't it knowing kubernetes now? Which does kinda tend to require you to also know a fair bit of "single machine" admin tools along with a whole slew of new complexity.
In fact, I'd argue that kubernetes was really made to remove sysadmin from being needed. For large kubes obviously some skill is needed but in the average case a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed. It was a huge boon for businesses that would otherwise have to pay both developers and sysadmins. Now they can pay one of them half the value!
The majority of other sysadmin tasks have been offloaded to cloud providers. For example, AWS makes setting up a network topology/compute/etc very easy. Sometimes these tasks are handled by SRE, a lot of times they are handled again by developers. Terraform really brought everything together in an absolutely brainless mechanism to get things started (with the subsequent pitfalls).
k8s is a great lever for sysadmin. It's the kind of tool we spoke of in fevered tones when we shared legends of "automating our job so we would only need to pick they paycheck". Does it mean there's less need for absolute Ops-side numbers? Sure. Did we have the numbers before? hahaha, fat chance, nope. So in my experience, moving onto k8s often means my job involves less understaffing now, less panic, and less cursing. Most importantly, less reasons to visit Scary Devil Monastery (alt.sysadmin.recovery).
And if the low amount of work starts to get depressing... you can always take another job[1] or start engineering the shit out of the infrastructure. Bonus points if you make it without making it problem for future you (so documentation and the like) and without raising costs.
[1] A polish joke about sysadmins: "Hey, Joe lost a job, you heard?" "How can he deal with having only 5 full time jobs?"
> The majority of other sysadmin tasks have been offloaded to cloud providers
Yes. There is a word for this process: deskilling — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling
It is typically followed or accompanied by a loss of autonomy and/or other privileges in the workplace
I've yet to meet a dev who knows how or wants to create and maintain the IaC to manage the infra.
> Terraform really brought everything together in an absolutely brainless mechanism
Understanding Terraform's limitations and being able to work around it in a way that is both readable and scalable is most definitely not brainless. Sure, I can write some .tf files to spin up an EKS cluster pretty easily. Load balancer? I can also do that in Terraform, or I can let the cluster manage its own. Uh-oh, a fork. Which one is better? What if I want to have multiple AWS accounts; how do I properly delegate IAM permissions across them? Etc.
They’re paying the other half of the value to the cloud provider, more or less. Ideally, perhaps a bit less. But that’s how business works. The cloud provider is operating these systems much better than 99+% of companies could hope to do.