You’re quite mistaken on the first point.

Most automation that you know of as “devops tools” are borne from sysadmins.

Terraform was written by a sysadmin; puppet, ansible, saltstack and cfengine too.

It is revisionist to think sysadmins were not automating their jobs.

Old school sysadmins used to know C, bash and Perl.

New school devops just traded that for a handful of DSLs and Python.

I’m sure some technicians working the IT department managed to get by running scripts created by sysadmins and claiming not to code, but it was definitely the common case that 20 years ago sysadmins could code and worked tirelessly to “automate themselves out of a job” (literally a mantra i was told as a sysadmin 15 years ago)

> Most old school sysadmins were doing everything manually with relatively little automation.

That's not true of any place I experienced in the early to late 90s. If you meant earlier, perhaps, I wasn't there.

The growth of perl, for example, was in great part from the sysadmin community automating everything.

I mean, you're not wrong in that there's definitely a massive difference between the power of tools that a devops engineer can use today vs what a sys admin had access to back in the day before the devops movement was established (and that was a clear break point that was announced all over the likes of HN and there was a manifesto and all that).

But nowadays if you want to manage your own metal then you can use those tools as well. You can still run hypervisors VMs on your own servers. You're just not paying Amazon 6x the price of what it would cost you, and you're not relegated to low-performing compute, memory, and IO elements that Amazon standardized on.

Not necessarily true - many were doing tons of scripting.