Sysops

SysOps, short for systems operations, refers to the discipline and team responsible for the ongoing administration, monitoring, and maintenance of an organization's IT infrastructure. The scope can include on‑premises data centers, public clouds, and hybrid environments, with an emphasis on reliability, availability, and performance.

Key responsibilities include monitoring and incident response, deployment and release management, configuration and change management, backup and disaster recovery planning, capacity planning, and basic security hardening. SysOps teams work to minimize downtime, apply patches, manage access controls, and ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations.

Common tools and practices include monitoring and alerting (such as Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, and Grafana), log aggregation (ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk), configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt), virtualization and cloud platforms (VMware, AWS, Azure, GCP), and automation of repeatable tasks through scripting and CI/CD pipelines.

In organizations, SysOps sits alongside development and security teams. While DevOps emphasizes collaboration and end‑to‑end automation across the software delivery lifecycle, SysOps concentrates on stable operation and day‑to‑day infrastructure management. SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) often share reliability goals with SysOps but apply software‑engineering techniques to systems management.

Typical qualifications include Linux/Windows administration, scripting (Python, Bash), networking basics, and familiarity with virtualization, containers, and security practices. Certifications such as AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate, Azure Administrator Associate, and other vendor certifications are common pathways into the field.