Why the NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators 251
An anonymous reader writes "Curious about the recently purposed NSA cuts, Courtney Nash explores a few myths about systems automation 'In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to "improve security." So far, I've mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn't add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.'"
They seem to have a strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently they look for clues to organizations that have solved similar problems.
NSA Boosting Automation in Wake of Snowden Leaks [wsj.com]
The agency has created a private cloud using OpenStack, a Web standard developed by NASA and Rackspace Hosting Inc. Analysts say this lets the NSA run its IT operations in a way that more closely mirrors that of Amazon.com Inc. or Google Inc. Previously, it took weeks or months for employees at NSA to get access to computing resources, said Nathanael Burton, a computer scientist speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Portland in June. The private cloud “let us grow to a scale that a very small team of 12 to 15 people could manage,” he said.
“We’ve transformed the NSA and over the next few months we’re going to be working with the larger intelligence community to roll out our OpenStack system across the entire intelligence community,” said Mr. Burton in a video of the conference. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Re:replace Windoze with Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Windows server management is much more SysAdmin intensive than Linux server management. Most Linux Boxes are "fire and forget" after they have been configured. Windows boxes decay quickly, and need a great deal more upkeep from the SysAdmin.
Why do you think that? Sure, unskilled Windows Admins have to fiddle with it relatively often, but not good Windows admins. I have a couple of SAP, Exchange and other Windows servers I have to manage. They don't require any more babysitting that any of the linux boxes do. They're all VMs on Hyper V or Xen or ESX and I worry more about patching the host firmware than anything else.
I choose to check up on them, and verify that backups are really restorable, etc, but in terms of HAVING to manully manage them? Not this year. And I do it all with built in tools, no "enterprise" level management either. Just bandwidth, scheduling and lots of disk space and scripts.
Re:replace Windoze with Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Why do you think that?
We're on Slashdot, where most posters are clueless about systems administration, let alone Windows systems administration.
But shit, getting back to GP - fire and forget a Linux box and you can forget about it doing anything other than spewing out metric tons of spam.
Re:Laying off Americans, hiring Bangladeshi ? (Score:2, Informative)
Nicest dude I've ever met in my life is from bangladesh. On his behalf I am respectfully informing you and anyone who bothers to read this that Bangladesh is not India. They are two separate countries. They are close to each other, but they are different countries. As you're here I know you're too proud to be comfortable with being incorrect on technical subjects, so I apologize for telling you you're wrong.
Be well, my friend.