Power engineering is one of type of electrical engineering. Demand has shifted away from that type.
In the same way, the demands shifts from one sort of systems administrator -- the traditional sys admin who racks and stacks machine and manually edits config files on a UNIX system, to another: one who approaches the problem from a computer science and engineering point of view (using software such as chef/puppet, developing custom tooling, working closely with application developers, etc...).
All of this is not news to me: I've been doing this kind of work in 2006 at Yahoo before it had a buzz word ("devops") attached to it (these days I've shifted to being "pure" software developer). Broadly speaking, we had three kinds of operations personnel: those working at the physical layer, the network layer and those working between the operating system and the application layer.
Majority of the upper layer work was either writing code or working very closely with application developers. Thanks to these tools we could deploy and re-deploy machines within the matter of minutes (with no virtualization involved) and handle servers arriving by the truckloads.
I'm glad that Amazon and others have made the lower layers a publicly available service, so that the people preferring to work at the upper layers _but would prefer to be in a startup_ (rather than a corporate behemoth) could concentrate on the work they find fulfilling.
In the same way, the demands shifts from one sort of systems administrator -- the traditional sys admin who racks and stacks machine and manually edits config files on a UNIX system, to another: one who approaches the problem from a computer science and engineering point of view (using software such as chef/puppet, developing custom tooling, working closely with application developers, etc...).
All of this is not news to me: I've been doing this kind of work in 2006 at Yahoo before it had a buzz word ("devops") attached to it (these days I've shifted to being "pure" software developer). Broadly speaking, we had three kinds of operations personnel: those working at the physical layer, the network layer and those working between the operating system and the application layer.
Majority of the upper layer work was either writing code or working very closely with application developers. Thanks to these tools we could deploy and re-deploy machines within the matter of minutes (with no virtualization involved) and handle servers arriving by the truckloads.
I'm glad that Amazon and others have made the lower layers a publicly available service, so that the people preferring to work at the upper layers _but would prefer to be in a startup_ (rather than a corporate behemoth) could concentrate on the work they find fulfilling.