The life of a sysadmin in a research environment

Eric Burgueno
A SysAdmin job is pretty standard, and more or less the same across the board, right? (right?). It seems this is not always true.
When working in a science research organisation, you not only get to do everything you know and loved to do in your previous jobs, you also learn a lot.
Scientists have varied demands. So varied that they never finish using one thing before asking for another one. And they move at a much faster pace than your average IT organisation, where weekly Change Control meetings and ITIL-based operations are king. But at the same time, Science is playing catch-up with DevOps methodologies. Things do not move at the same rapid pace today, because of the complexities inherent to a shared computational environment.
Can long running jobs that take literally months to complete, have a peaceful and stable existence; in an environment that is striving to become more flexible and volatile?