>>Senior sysadmins are really hard to come by today, not to mention someone who wants to do architecture also.
I am not so sure... I am a well seasoned sysadmin, been doing server, network, architecture. I consider myself a solid linux/network expert and have managed datacenters. When I look for a new/more exciting job, or for a pay raise, all I see are "cloud, AWS, devops". I never see "old school" sysadmin jobs e.g. as you say, we have a room full of linux boxes and we manage them with ansible/scripts/etc, but we design and maintain them ourselves, come join our team".
> When I look for a new/more exciting job, or for a pay raise, all I see are "cloud, AWS, devops". I never see "old school" sysadmin jobs
Because the old school systems just chug alongg with a minimum of administration, while those newfangled cloud thingamajigs need tons of adminning...?
I mean, that's one interpretation of your (admittedly, anecdotal -- but that's what I see too. Lots of anecdotes sums up to:) data. A valid one, AFAICS.
You should learn some AWS and use it as a trojan horse to get those jobs. As a former old school sysadmin I really took to it because it's so modular and feels like Unix's "collection of simple tools piped together". Plus, any old school admin is a treasure on any cloud team because the need to drop to shell is unavoidable. People think they don't need sysadmins on cloud teams but behind every good cloud team are a few good sysadmins.
I am not so sure... I am a well seasoned sysadmin, been doing server, network, architecture. I consider myself a solid linux/network expert and have managed datacenters. When I look for a new/more exciting job, or for a pay raise, all I see are "cloud, AWS, devops". I never see "old school" sysadmin jobs e.g. as you say, we have a room full of linux boxes and we manage them with ansible/scripts/etc, but we design and maintain them ourselves, come join our team".