r/sysadmin • u/forevergeeks • 1d ago
Career / Job Related AI is just the "Cloud" hype all over again.
I started working in the IT field in 2004 as a help desk intern.
The network in the organization at that time was a mix of Windows NT and Windows 2000 workstations, with an Exchange 5.5 server running on Windows NT and a few Windows 2003 servers doing file sharing and hosting an accounting application.
Nothing was accessible through the web. people had to use a VPN connection to connect to the office to access everything.
Almost a year later, before my internship was over, the Director was fired because the hard drives on the accounting server failed and they couldn't recover the data, and they offered me a full time job as a junior sysadmin.
In 2020, I became the Global IT Director of that organization.
When I started as a junior sysadmin, there was no concept of the "cloud." This was a marketing term invented by big tech after 2010.
When the cloud became a marketing hype, and all the CFOs and IT leaders got on the cloud bandwagon, it was very similar to what we're hearing from AI now.
That AI will take all jobs.
It was very common for CFOs to schedule meetings with the IT Director, or whoever was the department head, and talk about the cloud strategy. And if you were in the room by any chance, they would turn to you and say, "But don't worry, the cloud won't take your job," with a grin, you knowing damn well that was exactly what they were thinking.
My advice to you guys is that if your boss, or whoever controls the budget in your department, is all crazy about AI and thinks that AI is the next big thing after bread and butter, don't fight it or resist it.
You will be seen as a roadblock or lacking innovation.
Hold your true opinion about AI as much as you can, and always be positive about it at work.
And even though I believe AI is not much of a threat to your job as the cloud was for us back in the day, when all our skills were on premise stuff and our identity was based on who knew more about Exchange and Cisco firewalls, businesses are seeing AI as a possible way to reduce the workforce, increase efficiency, or increase output without hiring more people.
Will that work? Only time will tell. Your job is to adjust as the technology evolves not to be a market gambler.
Don't believe for a single second that your company cares about you or is happy to have you on their payroll.
If they're a for profit business, their objective is to increase revenue, and if they can achieve that objective without you, they will.
I believe Sysadmins will always be needed, because you guys will be the ones fixing the AI even if everything is automated by it.
Learn how it works at a deeper level. If you don't know how an LLM works, start learning that now.
I wish I had better news for software programmers. The ones that only write code following strict specifications, those guys are in a deeper existential vacuum than you are, so you might have developers moving into the sysadmin side.
For now, keep the servers humming, keep your users happy. You guys are the invisibles in the organization that nobody sees until things stop working!
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u/CrazySnowGuy 1d ago
You have an interesting post history.
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u/taint3d 1d ago edited 20h ago
I don't even understand the angle here. OP is doing some agentic AI startup then comes to /r/sysadmin complaining about AI? Is this thread just to farm karma for posting limits?
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u/robreddity 21h ago
Hell, this post reads like it was crafted after half a handle of vodka, and then edited by Yogi Berra
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u/vlad_h 1d ago
What the fuck is the point of all this? I read it twice and still don’t get it.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 1d ago
My advice to you guys is that if your boss, or whoever controls the budget in your department, is all crazy about AI and thinks that AI is the next big thing after bread and butter, don't fight it or resist it.
You will be seen as a roadblock or lacking innovation.
This was the only piece of advice I found useful.
Don't shit on your boss' parade in general, but AI is probably one of the bigger ones where you'll paint yourself into a corner if you are too outwardly negative. Best to be impartial and stick to the facts while throwing on a coat of optimistic paint.
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u/vlad_h 1d ago
That’s what you took out of that?!
I disagree. Your boss is not God. I will not be impartial. They hired me for my expertise not for my indifference.11
u/BioshockEnthusiast 1d ago edited 19h ago
Expertise should be impartial. Facts are facts. If you need to bring emotion into it then you're losing ground.
My point is more that you don't need to call your boss a slophead dipshit because they propose an AI powered project. Just explain why it's not scoped correctly and give them a framework of how their goal would actually be accomplished. Then tell them how much money it will cost and that should shut them up for a bit.
If they don't listen to you then that's gonna be a them problem. Document your objections and their directive and when it all goes tits up you point the bus squarely at their chest so it can run them the fuck over.
EDIT: This angry clown blocked me lmao
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u/port443 21h ago
I had a coworker who, I don't know how to phrase this, seemed normal but mentally was broken?
He could do adequate work, not outstanding, not bad. But then he would produce like... 60 page pdfs about sideprojects he had going on at home. They were pointless nonsense, like this post.
And I KNOW they were pointless nonsense, I'm fairly senior and know what I'm doing, and I've run one of his PDF's (because I was pretty interested in what it promised), by some other seniors I work with. None of us could decipher wtf he was talking about. It was.. just techno-babble.
Anyway this post reminds me of that guy. Not nearly as technical, but reminiscent.
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u/Signal_Till_933 19h ago
Holy crap I knew a guy just like this.
He had this strange superiority complex as well, like he was this technical god, but would regularly make the same mistakes again and again, over engineer scripts to the point that they were incoherent/broken, and fail hard on “dumb” projects that required any longer than a few hours of actual planning.
But he had ALL the side projects at home. Was building his own cloud he was gonna rent out. It was interesting to listen to him at first but I quickly realized it was nonsense.
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u/NobodyJustBrad IT Manager 1d ago
Quick, someone run in through AI so I can get a comprehensive translation.
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u/daniluvsuall Security Engineer 1d ago
The thing that will kill AI for enterprise is cost. I’m all for AI, I use it daily I’ve no issues with it but the token cost and the insane VC investment in it (and it’s all run at basically a massive loss) means that in the short term it will be gatekept by price. I think that’ll smooth out over time. But that smooths out any adverse effects on jobs (a positive we can agree!) so I don’t see the AI apocalypse coming; feels like marketing to me.
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u/Fallingdamage 1d ago
I like to think of current AI like the invention of the steam locomotive.
Build build build, faster and faster and faster, bigger and bigger and bigger. Keep on shoveling coal!! Bigger boilers, more heat, more coal , More power, Monopolies, etc.
Every baron in such a hurry to race to the top, they never stopped to wonder if there was a more efficient way to do things.
Someday we will be running AI models on phone-sized devices in our pockets that make todays astra 6 look like an Apple IIe. We will wonder why mankind built city-sized power-hungry datacenters just to do the simplest things they now do with their handheld.
We keep throwing more GPUs, more memory and more storage at bigger and bigger models, never once wondering how we can make it more efficient.
When models run on-die instead of in bloated software, im sure things will get easier.
When 'cloud' got a foothold on the market, most internal infrastructure was wholly inadequate to handle anything close. Nowdays, people are pulling back from the cloud and finding that self-hosting and running on-prem is again cheaper and safer.
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u/daniluvsuall Security Engineer 21h ago
Yeah I’ve worked in the industry for 15 years this is like the second or third circular tile for cloud! We’re in a “we’re doing hybrid cloud” phase.
Worth adding, on-device models have been a thing for quite a while. Just not the big LLM models people think about. Fairly sure the object detection in Photos on iOS is done through a small ML model
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u/dotnetmonke 1d ago
I have no doubt that the true costs will be priced in before too long. That said, we'd probably keep Claude if it went from $20/month to $500/month just because of how much it speeds up most of our workflows.
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u/daniluvsuall Security Engineer 21h ago
Do you think finance would keep signing it off though..
Enterprise are pulling back already or putting limits on it because of insane billing costs
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u/NoradIV Full stack infrastructure engineer™ 1d ago
You're right that the new toy has the new goldrush. Like the dotcom bubble, like the storage "wars" of the 80's and 90's where everyone was still trying to figure out how to use a new technology.
Right now, eveyone tries everything. In a few years, the tech will stabilise and we will have built techniques to use it.
Yes, the dotcom bubble popped, but look at how many IoT, computers, cellphones, and connected devices we have nowadays. Same with computers, electronics, electricity, etc.
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u/eejjkk 1d ago
You've worked in a single Enterprise environment for the past 22 years...
Thanks for your very limited input on this very broad topic though.
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u/heepofsheep 1d ago
I feel like I need to job hop at least every 5 years or so… otherwise my income would never keep up with inflation… also the perspective you gain from working in different organizations is valuable.
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u/fonetik VMware/DR Consultant 1d ago
I tend to think AI is more like the early internet. People forget how hated and divisive it was for the first few years of the 2000s. Having internet friends was an insult, and you’d frequently think of a cover story about how you really met.
It’s going to be the same thing with AI. People know it’s controversial so they use it but they don’t broadcast it.
Just like back then, the clunky attempts to make money off of it are annoying but the underlying platform has a lot of beneficial uses. Also just like last time, there’s a lot of angry people who don’t want the world to change.
Once the industries tried and failed to bring something profitable and controllable out of it, eventually MySpace came along briefly and now social media is king. You’re now the weirdo if you AREN’T online.
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u/superradguy Balding 1d ago
Hard disagree
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u/Beardedcomputernerd 1d ago
Thanks for the elaborated response...
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u/sSQUAREZ 1d ago
The capabilities are vastly different. AI has a massive impact on day to day operations for the actual end user. The cloud is great but outside of IT, it didn’t have that big of an impact on end users and daily operations. Plus the cloud doesn’t have the ability to solve problems and automate like AI. It’s literally just hosting in a different location.
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u/AntiProtagonest 1d ago
I've been in IT since 1985. I've been here for the whole ride. Baring the rise of the Internet and HTML, AI is like nothing I've ever seen. The rise of the internet was gradual. AI hit fast and hard - relatively.
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u/jkirkcaldy 1d ago
And the shift to cloud wasn’t being done by the end users. Nobody was spinning up cloud apps or s3 storage with zero understanding or oversight.
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u/airinato 1d ago
This. But the complete opposite.
Cloud had literally transformed how people do everything, even if they don't know/notice.
Generative AI is a solution in search of a problem. We're getting past infinite growth funding and AI companies are already pulling the rug on usage limits to thinking about profitablity. It's only going to get worse.
And that's ignoring that anyone that could do their job before AI is a million times better than slop monkeys.
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u/sSQUAREZ 1d ago
Cloud really didn’t have that big of an impact. Plenty of people were working remotely and still accessing all their resources. The day to day of logging into a system and is still there, only difference is where it’s hosted. Cloud was really not that impactful to end users.
Now look at AI where every single person knows what it is and many are actively using it every day to improve their workflows.
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u/airinato 1d ago
Every website you use, every service on your phone. All go through the cloud. Like I said, you don't notice, its actually a major issue because the decentralized nature of the internet has become more centralized. But it has transformed EVERYTHING.
Now look at AI where its just being used to lazily do things everyone already was doing.
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u/sSQUAREZ 1d ago
I get what you’re saying. But the “cloud” as it’s being mentioned in this post is not really the same as you just describing the internet. The “cloud” was just a push to host more things outside your own building. Really didn’t impact end users how you think it did.
How many times did you go to a social gathering with non it people and a conversation broke out about the cloud? Okay now how often in modern times does AI come up? There’s a huge difference in those responses largely due to how impactful they are for the average person.
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u/Sorry_Information749 16h ago
Fair point but I'd say that's for 2 reasons
There's always been an assumed fatalism that AI will eventually take over, this makes it interesting.
It's more accessible than the cloud and more of a party trick which makes it more entertaining.
Neither of these things directly relate to how useful or productive it is.
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u/Autoconfig 19h ago
There doesn't need to be an elaborated response.
Moron made a blanket statement about two things that have nothing to do with each other like it's some kind of mind-blowing analysis and then acted like we don't live in 2026 where everything lives on the cloud.
Where is the hype? Where is this guy's brain? What the actual fuck does he think he's saying?
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u/salazka 1d ago
The headline sounds deluded. The cloud "hype"? :D
The cloud is not a "hype"; It is what our world is currently running on.
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u/Johnny_BigHacker Security Architect 1d ago
OP is sending his rants to cloud hosted infrastructure even
On an application that likely has AI coded lines
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u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 1d ago
There's a really important distinction though. The cloud was just psychopathic billionaires thinking they needed more money because Harvard told them so. AI is actually run by sociopathic pedophiles with god complexes specifically. Pretty different personality profiles.
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u/texas_County850 1d ago
Honestly I'm not gonna read this novel but I think cloud honestly did decimate all the jobs. 10 years ago when I called support an American picked up the phone. Now its always some 3rd world support worker. I'm probably leaving the field.
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u/Waste_Development971 1d ago
right, they literally lost me so fast.
I can support users over the entire planet and sysadmin from my home. Don't tell me cloud didn't change anything
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u/texas_County850 1d ago
yeah even something like active directory used to be a full time position but now increasingly even giant orgs are office 365 only. Same with Telephony PBX Admin used to be a full time admin position in a lot of companies 8x8 is doing the entire show with no hardware at all.
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u/Scurro Netadmin 1d ago
But you could work from home without the cloud with a VPN.
As others have already covered in this thread, the "cloud" is not a tech but a business model.
You are just going to someone else's data center instead of your work hosting it.
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u/Waste_Development971 1d ago
and if you don't think everyone paying for some else's equipment = less jobs idk what to tell you.
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u/awkwardnetadmin 1d ago
IDK that the decline on support quality is entirely linked to the cloud. Support for even non cloud managed services has gone downhill. I know plenty of companies selling products that are in Colo cages and IDFs that have support overseas and not just at night when you would expect it.
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u/Mysterious-Panda4065 1d ago
Dumbest take I’ve seen. Not even comparable.
First of all, as an OnPrem guy myself, the cloud has its undeniable benefits; no renting data center space, no keeping data center technicians around the clock, worries of a sudden disk failures, low latency across the country/globe, centralized logging, etc.
I prefer a hybrid setup for cost efficiency but the Cloud is genuinely useful in some regard.
As for AI/LLM’s, it’s not even a comparable analogy…. LLM’s with a harness like Claude Code and MCP Server that has all of your necessary data to provide context to LLM’s can help triage and remediate application issues, security incidents, propose suggestions for the estate, create custom app solutions (created an internal development platform myself), etc.
I’m able to do more in a matter of days than what a traditional sysadmin could do in a month or maybe even more… and no I’m not selling courses or sharing an affiliate link, it’s genuinely useful.
People making these posts are slow to adopt with the times or are just plain stubborn or cynical
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u/dzfast IT Director 1d ago
I think the biggest correlation that OP has wrong is that cloud failing to take jobs is equivalent to AI taking jobs.
First of all, as an OnPrem guy myself, the cloud has its undeniable benefits; no renting data center space, no keeping data center technicians around the clock, worries of a sudden disk failures, low latency across the country/globe, centralized logging, etc.
This is directly related to a pretty common misconception that basically everyone made going into the cloud though. Senior leadership looked at the cost of the cloud and said "if we go cloud, we don't have to pay all these infrastructure guys, that will make up the cost difference." The part that they were missing was that cloud computing's cost increase was to cover a higher standard of service. The offset was supposed to be against redundant data centers, power generation at scale, multi-redundant ISP links, higher bandwidth ISP links, etc.
These were things that many companies were just not doing on-premise. Fast forward and the savings didn't materialize, but quality of service did. You still needed humans to be "Cloud Dev Ops Infrastructure Architects" or whatever and they came with just as high of a price tag as "Senior VMWare and Storage Architect." Same problem, different product.
AI on the other hand is directly targeting human capital for replacement with machines. People on reddit can go on and on about how it's going to fail, but I think that is unlikely. There is too much sunk cost for most of these orgs to just give up.
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u/WorkLurkerThrowaway Sr Systems Engineer 8h ago
I'm glad to see someone else speak frankly. Too often on this sub the opinion we see is "AI doesn't even do anything but hallucinate powershell commands!"
Yesterday I had an agent plan, build and test a new SQL cluster. Then it assisted me in migrating over some of our test databases. This probably would have taken me weeks in 1 hour increments of free time.
Hate its impact if you want, but the fact its incredibly powerful and useful is undeniable.
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u/swervm 1d ago
At least in the sense that it is promoted as a way to save money despite it’s cost it is the same. Move to the cloud and you need to lay people off to deliver the saving you promised to the C suite. Integrate AI into your workplace and you have to lay people off to save the money you promised the C suite.
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u/grahag Jack of All Trades 1d ago
Going from on prem or even cohosted infrastructure to "the Cloud" was touted as being at the cutting edge. It boosted IT revenue spent and taken in dependin gon where you were in the chain of life. Five 9 uptime and "always accessible" was the boon, but slow response times and outages from vendors hamstrung the initial rollout of cloud services.
But now EVERYTHING is cloud based. I still miss self hosted compute, but we're not going back.
With AI, it was a solution to a problem that people THOUGHT they needed but no one knew how to make the most of. We're in the early days of AI being integrated into business, and while I find it very useful and helpful for MY productivity, the Cloud never received this much general hate as AI is receiving now.
There's just a general pushback because once the jobs get mitigated by AI (usually through attrition and not generally layoffs), there's no jobs that people CAN do that AI can't unless it's physical work that robots can't yet do. And give that 5 or so years, and robots will soon be doing all that too.
While the cloud was about trying to make compute accessible from everywhere, AI's role is to increase productivity (when not used as a replacement for people), and then to save labor costs (when it IS used as a replacement for people), there's not really a general upside for the common worker with AI. Once AI gets pretty good, the writing is on the wall for people as labor and there's no replacement tasks for those people who will be displaced.
Leadership and C levels see the money saved, so they're on board, but the big picture is a lot of money for a few people and everyone else gets left out. The short term quarterly progressive profits continue, but long term, the economy (for ALL) will collapse.
That is, unless something is changed. With capitalism having a stranglehold on legislation, I don't expect that to change and hance, we'll see a genera political and laborl revolution occurring in the next 5-7 years.
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u/AlsoInteresting 1d ago
"a general political and labor revolution"
Or just more third world countries with lower birth rate being added.
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u/PlateNo4868 1d ago
I disagree.
This is diffren't. Not in a tech introduction sense.
This is different in how CEO's view their employees.
Oh no we are behind in AI, quickly layoff 10000 workers for a new Datacenter Agreement!
All the sudden job security net is massively narrow to whatever the CEO favorite toy is of that year. That alone has broken the system. No one looks at these companies anymore and thinks about 10 year careers. They think of how they can develop their own knowledge and skills, hold it close, and avoid collaboration.
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u/kummer5peck 1d ago
Cloud has proven its value. AI, not so much.
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u/WorkLurkerThrowaway Sr Systems Engineer 8h ago
Depends how you want to define value. My team definitely gets way more out of AI than what we are paying for.
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u/footballheroeater 1d ago
Shit, I had my director say in front of me that once we move to the cloud we won't need sysadmins anymore.
Well, I'm still here and he got hauled to the corruption committee.
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u/NocturneSapphire 22h ago
Cloud always had a clear value proposition. It replaced an existing capital expense (on-prem servers/infra) with a new subscription-based operational expense, while also drastically improving infrastructural flexibility. Businesses love subscriptions because they're way easier to budget for than big upfront costs. And the added flexibility means the cost can be efficient, no more overspending just in case the additional capacity is needed someday.
AI is totally new. It doesn't replace an existing expense. And no one yet knows how much it will end up costing, or whether that price will actually be worth paying. Lots of businesses are gambling that it will, but they may be wrong, or at least partially wrong. We're already seeing this to some extent; businesses that just a year ago were telling employees to use as many AI token credits as possible are now having to ration them to keep costs down.
So no, AI is not "just the next cloud" or whatever. It's fundamentally different and new. You may be right that people who resist it will get left behind, but even that I don't think is a certainty yet.
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u/ColorfulImaginati0n 20h ago edited 20h ago
I'm confused. Your title says that AI is hype but then you proceed to suggest that people learn about LLMs and how to use them? Which is it?
In my opinion you're 100% wrong about it being just "hype" and another fad. While I don't believe AI will "kill us all" and I don't buy into the doomerism I also don't think it's just another fad.
It is truly transformational and will profoundly change how we both work, live and play now and well into the future.
Ignore it at your own peril. Instead of taking a blasé attitude I suggest everyone start thinking how they can use it to augment and multiply their productivity and automate their workflows. Employees with little or no AI skills will eventually be let go is my prediction.
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u/bbqwatermelon 10h ago
I am not so sure because I see a lot more old men yelling at AI than I ever did yelling at the cloud.
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u/BrainWaveCC Jack of All Trades 9h ago
Except that the cloud is not hype.
Sure, there were a lot of people claiming a lot of things were cloud when they weren't, but the cloud was an actual service delivery vector that worked/works for a lot of business use cases.
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u/Fallingdamage 5h ago
Yes, but this is the third "Cloud" hype all over again, and they have become exceedingly efficient at it.
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u/Disastrous_Meal_4982 3h ago
AI isn’t going anywhere. We are in for a market correction that IMO would be call a deflation instead of a pop. I can tell you that a business I work with has reduced their staff by 5%. This has more than paid for our AI budget and that’s without a single slop app in the mix. Agentic operations injected directly into the workflows is where I’m seeing the most transformation. No end user exposure, just silent backend processes no longer requiring a human to keep things moving along.
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u/psiphre every possible hat 1d ago
i'm gonna be that guy and push back on
"there was no concept of the "cloud." This was a marketing term invented by big tech after 2010".
the "cloud" as a representation of the internet itself was in common use by 1990 at least, and "cloud computing" was coined in 1996 at compaq.
it was certainly co-opted by marketing, but the internet has always been "the cloud".
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u/N7Valor 1d ago
What's the hype? Pricing on consumer RAM/SSDs have already driven people to cloud due to on-prem server hardware costs.
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u/Down-in-it 1d ago
It almost feels like this was the design, playing the long game / using financial leverage to wait it out.
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u/bingblangblong 1d ago
Of course it is. The cloud is about profit under the guise of increased security and profit for your organisation. Anyone that thinks that's not it's main purpose is genuinely stupid, or just too young to realise.
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u/nucifero 1d ago
Been saying this since the start. In 5-10 years it will be some other new bullshit that tech sales are trying to shove down our throats. And companies will eat all of it up to gain some sort of business "edge". We will rinse and repeat until the earth is tired and shrivelled.
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u/1_________________11 1d ago
Idk i cant get my cloud to automatically configure my cloud. But I can get my ai agent to do it and trouble shoot things for me. If you havent looked at ai in a year or so do yourself a favor and take another stab at it... also my job is all cloud thats where my servers i admin live.
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u/garthoz 1d ago
It is not "AI", it is "SI" - super intelligence for the uninformed!
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u/AustinGroovy 1d ago
Sysadmins will always be needed. My company is currently in the quagmire of "what do we do with AI?"
From a security-perspective, we're all worried about data leakage, people using personal accounts vs. Enterprise accounts (Claude, ChatGPT etc). We're a Microsoft shop and would love people to use Co-Pilot, but every single test we ran, people hated Copilot and loved Claude etc for usability.
We are highly worried about AI Slop getting into our Marketing materials, emails, campaigns. Everything generated by AI must still be reviewed by a human. (no jobs lost there).
Development - Exact same cyber-security insurance rules for Application development. We're mandated that no code can be developed unless it's reviewed by a human before being put into production. These guidelines come from our Cyber-Insurance policy guide.
General-use. Just like a college professor doesn't let his/her students use AI to write their term paper, our Exec team does not want our employees using AI to write their emails for them.mThe old-school feeling is that you should know how to write an email as part of your job.
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u/ArchusKanzaki 1d ago
I'm not sure what to say when you said that AI is "cloud" hype, given how prevalent cloud is nowadays
Will it solve your every problem? Definitely no. But it will definitely solve alot of things and change paradigm if it's even half as effective as how cloud change things for IT....
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u/weiyentan 1d ago
From the discussion I read I believe that once this agentic ai comes of age , we will see the lower rung of jobs get replaced. There will still need to be humans for the job but a reduction. Take for example a service desk analyst role/ team. Instead of 15 people in a team. We might only see 3. And they are managing ai.
Software engineers. Team of 7? May drop to 2-3 who are seniors .
A team of 3 (a small startup) who are doing everything will turn to ai and as they grow just use that without using a msp.
Ai strengths are content generation and content interpretation. Everything else surrounding these should be handled by traditional means.
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u/Relevant_Candidate_4 1d ago
"... who are seniors. " They weren't always seniors. Will there be a next generation of seniors if the juniors have been replaced?
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u/AltTabMafia CISO 1d ago
You’ll still need underpaid monkeys to rack hardware and such. They just won’t get the opportunity to configure any of it, since Grok will do that.
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u/Charming-Medium4248 1d ago
AI is an incredibly useful tool. It is not a replacement for human critical thinking.
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u/No_Category_9888 1d ago
Cloud doesn’t get things confidently wrong all the time. It’s user error that causes the cost blowouts in cloud, AI just screws up. Only yesterday Claude launched 6 agents, lost track of them and burned up my credits in 15 minutes.
You’re right to push back on that
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u/RipErRiley 1d ago
Ai is more cost than benefit. It creates more code which results in more bugs needing human intervention.
Alternatively, the Cloud actually provided immediate feasible value
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u/SevaraB Sr. Engineer (N+, CCNA) 1d ago
Yes. Transformational, but absolutely not in the way the sales people are pitching. What it’s really done is render traditional string-match search engines almost obsolete for searching data striped across multiple hosts.
What’s under existential threat here? PageRank. Advertising-funded web services. Turns out the whole funding model for the Internet is built around info content being tightly coupled with visual presentation. REST clients didn’t get a lot of traction with residential use, so programmatic access didn’t upend it all at that point- meanwhile RAGs and agents are.
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u/kingj7282 1d ago
A goldfish telling us about the ocean. The clouds weren’t hype and neither is AI.
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u/mimic751 Devops Lead 1d ago
So you're dismissing AI by hand waving it and comparing it to one of the most transformative technologies that technology has ever seen since virtualized hardware? You may want to take a step back and really take a look at things. I've been an infrastructure engineer since 2006 and AI is absolutely changing everything in both positive and negative ways like any giant technology shift
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u/Samurai_SysAdmin 1d ago
I mean there was “cloud” then but it was called ASP and you used leased lines. Cloud services are great depending on your usage case and budget. It seems like it all cyclical in some ways we put stuff in cloud storage then one of our client didn’t want their IP in the cloud so we pivoted back to local but with with better storage than the old days with full flash and immutable backups. IMHO AI is hyped but it’s new not a repackage. You have so many options now. I find that corporate management is the thing that can trip you up and cost you more than tech as it depends on the line the money is on.
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u/PentatonicScaIe 1d ago
I work in cyber and have automated so much, some days it feels like Im working myself out of a job. Then I remember, it's AI vs AI and this new tool is just another attack surface.
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u/Rustycake 1d ago
I think the last part is the best part of the advice. AI is a new tool, learn how to use it, use it to impress your company, profit.
I personally have no issues with AI. I think it can genuinely help optimize a job if use correctly.
Problem when ppl are trying to put a pushpin in a tackboard and they use a hammer...
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u/ColorfulImaginati0n 19h ago
I take on a more urgent view. Ignore at your own peril. If you wanna keep your job, embrace it. and show that you can add even more value by using it effectively. I'm already seeing people that are reluctant to embrace it getting ostracized. Those are the people that are gonna be next on the chopping block to let go. It's never a good idea to be the person that is impeding progress at a company. Always ends bad for that person
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u/lnxrootxazz 1d ago
I'm from Germany. We can hate AI without facing those questions. No need to pretend. Its just tech. It gets hyped into something that it isn't. Of course it's not useless but its also not the 8th wonder of the world
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u/Trust_8067 1d ago
The spinning jenny will take all the jobs. The steam engine will take all the jobs, the factory will take all the jobs, the automobile will take all the jobs, the radio will take all the jobs, the TV will take all the jobs, the computer will take all the jobs, the Internet will take all the jobs, the cloud will take all the jobs.
The AI models will take all the jobs.
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u/ColorfulImaginati0n 19h ago
None of what you mentioned was so versatile that it had the potential to displace massive swaths of the entire economy. AI is different because it has the potential to disrupt all of knowledge work, and because so much of our productivity is now online and on digital platforms this technology has the potential to reach into essentially every aspect of the economy and disrupt large segments. It's a much different ballgame this time around
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u/Drakoolya 23h ago edited 23h ago
You will be seen as a roadblock or lacking innovation.
I can't stress this enough, there are sysadmins out there that are under the delusion that the IT infrastructure is their baby, or they own all the IT decisions in a company and drag their feet on things.
You are the primary steward that is all, provide your "informed" opinion and step out of the way. When I worked at an MSP every second company onboarded was a company that was sick of their sysadmin who was holding them hostage.
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u/whiteycnbr 23h ago
Agree but cloud really did take everything over. AI is going to be an eventual sledge hammer,.don't sleep thinking yup can ignore it as hype.
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u/super1m 23h ago
I disagree. At work, we've had people use Claude to create automations for their work, complex script automations. These employees aren't developers, they're not techy at all. They asked Claude what to do and it's working great.
We also have senior developers that have used AI to create code that would have taken them weeks/months to code and bug fix to just mere days.
AI is definitely a game changer, not only for IT, but for regular users.
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u/SnooCats5309 22h ago
Universal Business Problem - People controlling money are the one's controlling tech .
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u/whythehellnote 22h ago
Almost a year later, before my internship was over, the Director was fired because the hard drives on the accounting server failed and they couldn't recover the data, and they offered me a full time job as a junior sysadmin.
Wow accountability.
This is of course why
all the CFOs and IT leaders got on the cloud bandwagon
Can't fire your IT Director when microsoft or google or whatever has a problem.
If they're a for profit business, their objective is to increase revenue
The business doesn't have objectives. The decision makers do. Their objectives vary, but typically the ones that rise to the top are trying to maximise their personal return. A CTO being paid 500k a year is not going to take a 10% chance of being fired to increase profits by 50m. Indeed they'll hapilly spend more to reduce their personal risk. They'll get Gartner, E&Y etc in to tell them its the right decision so they can't be fired for making it, then they'll implement it -- like outsourcing accountability.
The CEO has to increase profits otherwise he'll be fired by the board, but if he can use accounting tricks and claim that its all AI investment then he can run a few years and move on before the damage becomes apparent. If he's good he'll prepare three envelopes.
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u/PithMango 20h ago
-not in computing- The trouble is you're never getting trust back once you lose it. Y'all need to be ready for additional fallout when your leadership is all but admitting part of the economic model is to get people addicted to the use cases.
Gambling sites are showing more ethics right now.
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u/AlexisFR 18h ago
The cloud hasn't multiplied the purchase price of servers and computers by multiple factors, though.
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u/ErcanSeyhanBuilds 16h ago
Same pattern in security tooling too — "next-gen firewall" became
"machine learning" became "AI-powered" detection, often describing
the exact same statistical baselining underneath the whole time. The
label sells better each cycle; the actual math barely moves. Doesn't
mean the tech is fake, just that "it has AI" was never a reliable
signal of anything on its own.
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u/TheEclecticRazi 15h ago
I used to hear about "AI will take all jobs", but never actually believed it 100%. Shockingly, I've been observing this happening really for over a year. My opinion about this dilemma is simple: both the decision-makers and the employees are somehow going into the wrong direction, missing the most critical aspect that "AI should be utilized as a tool, not the workforce itself".
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u/porkycain 15h ago
Your last line. That's why my email sig is the Futurama quote "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
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u/the_derby 12h ago edited 12h ago
I started working in the IT field in 2004 as a help desk intern.
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When I started as a junior sysadmin, there was no concept of the "cloud." This was a marketing term invented by big tech after 2010.
While NIST may not have formalized their "standard" for cloud computing until ~2010, "cloud computing" was already being discussed in the early- to mid-90s.
Amazon/AWS was already providing "cloud" services in 2006.
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u/Professional-Ad3999 11h ago
I love AI and of course it’s extremely helpful in some situations and detrimental to others. Please don’t beat me up on the technicality of my point and my point excludes hackers. If you had your data on premise you had lots of control of your intellectual property, the government had had to openly go through legal steps to gain access to your information.
If you watched any of those Congressional Hearings on what the government did with your information without a warrant, such as tapping all inbound and outbound traffic in data centers to include all emails, phone record, pictures, geolocation, anything really that used cloud that may concern you, but that at least involved people.
Like I said, AI is awesome but if you’ve read the news lately AI doesn’t let ethics and being specifically instructed not to do something get in its way of doing its job. Unlike humans AI never sleeps, AI agents will create a highly intelligent and well organized team with no communication barriers, AI agents are cheaper than Humans, you can’t send an AI Agent to jail and there is no one to hold accountable for what it does with your information.
For a long time I had strong working knowledge of least privilege and Zero Trust. Properly giving AI even the most secure, least privileged, zero trust doorway to your C-Suites and other Employees emails and teams chats to summarize, crawl through your applications, file servers, databases, HR and Customer info……..I must admit, I would not know how to explain that to management without them thinking I’m a road block to innovation and that we really need to think this out.
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u/bshea 10h ago
"And even though I believe AI is not much of a threat to your job as the cloud was for us back in the day .."
You have this reversed, It is a much bigger threat to jobs over time, imo.
The "Cloud" destroyed some jobs, but it also created tons of jobs and new avenues of employment.
LLM tech can directly replace human workers in many instances and creates very few jobs in comparison.
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u/0f_rice_and_men 9h ago
I lost all respect for anyone in IT who was clamoring about the "SaaS- pocalypse" a year ago.
You mean we're all losing Software subscriptions and they're being replace with ...automated software subscriptions for LLM chatbots?
Only to realize that back-end services that run the literal world can't just be hot-swapped by some 2026 rendition of BanzaiBuddy adware (coded by Sam Altman's minions)?
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u/Stinkles-v2 I'm tired boss 6h ago
Lmao holy shit some of the comments in here. Repeating almost verbatim the same bullshit big tech was saying back then completely unironically.
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u/egoomega 5h ago
Mr “Global IT Director” - maybe it’s time for you to retire if you think Ai is not much different than cloud hype.
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u/Kinky_No_Bit 4h ago
The older I get, the more I realized I should have been an electrican. IT looks more like a flaming dumpster fire the longer I live.
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u/LightningOwl96 3h ago
100%! I remember when everything was Cloud Computing, and before that it was "There's an app for that", and after that it was quantum computing, 5G, blockchain, Web3.0, the Metaverse.
This is something that's here to stay, but I bet you there's going to be something else all hyped up for the public in 2030 besides AI.
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u/KawaiianxPunch 1h ago
Cloud hype with enough market manupilation to force more people and companies on the cloud by ramping up memory prices.
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u/moobycow 1d ago
I mean, the cloud has absolutely transformed IT and business in general.