À Propos

On cherche un System Administrator pour gérer notre infrastructure cloud.

On a des serveurs, des databases, des backups. T'en auras la responsabilité.

Pas sexy. Mais absolument essentiel.

Responsabilités

Infrastructure management (AWS, GCP, whatever we use)
Monitoring (make sure everything is up)
Backups/Disaster recovery (oh no, we lost data!)
User access management (who can access what?)
Incident response (the site is down!)
Capacity planning (do we need more servers?)

Profil Recherché

3-4 ans sysadmin or DevOps experience
Cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
Linux/shell scripting knowledge
Database basics (understand what's happening)
On-call readiness (you might be woken at 3am)

Ce Qu'On Veut

"You'll manage our infrastructure!"

Reality:
- You'll maintain existing infrastructure (someone else set it up)
- You'll inherit some questionable decisions
- You'll be on-call for incidents
- You'll be blamed when things break
- You'll be invisible when things work

La Comp

Salaire: 43k€
Equity: 0.08%
Benefits: Standard + maybe some emergency budget for tools

Le Jour Typique

9h-10h: Check monitoring dashboards (is everything green?)
10h-12h: Review logs (look for issues)
12h-13h: Lunch while monitoring alerts
13h-15h: Capacity planning or infrastructure improvements
15h-17h: Handle user requests (reset password, provision new machine)
17h-18h: Respond to any on-call issues

The 3AM Call

It's 3am. Your phone buzzes.

PagerDuty alert: "Database is down"

You: Groan

You: Check the dashboard

Servers are OK. Database is unresponsive.

You: Restart the database

Database comes back.

You: Check if data is intact (it is)

You: Go back to sleep

Next day: CEO wants to know what happened

You explain. CEO doesn't really understand but appreciates you were there.

The Infrastructure Decisions

Your predecessor made a choice: Use 5 small servers instead of 1 large one.

Theoretically good for resilience.

In practice: 5x the management complexity.

You inherit this.

You can't change it (too risky, nobody wants to migrate).

So you manage 5 servers when 1 would do.

The Scaling Problem

Company grows from 20 to 80 people.

Infrastructure needs to scale:
- More storage
- More computing power
- More databases
- Better monitoring

You're planning for this.

But the budget is tight.

So you compromise.

The Backup Paranoia

Every sysadmin's nightmare: "We lost all the data"

So you:
- Back up everything
- Back up the backups
- Test disaster recovery monthly
- Store backups in multiple places

People think you're paranoid.

Until something breaks and you have a backup.

Then you're a hero (for 1 day).

After 18 Months

Best Case:
- Infrastructure is solid
- No major incidents
- Scaling went smoothly
- You're happy

Realistic Case:
- Infrastructure is OK
- Had 1-2 incidents (handled well)
- Scaling was chaotic but worked
- You're reasonably happy
- Sometimes stressed

Worst Case:
- Major incident
- Data loss
- Weeks of recovery
- You're blamed
- You leave

Why It's Stressful

Infrastructure is critical.

Everything depends on it.

But nobody thinks about it until it breaks.

Then everyone blames you.

And you have to fix it under pressure.

The Skill

System administration is about problem-solving.

You need to:
- Understand complex systems
- Debug issues under pressure
- Make tradeoffs
- Communicate risk

It's hard. But valuable.

The Advice

If you like: Problem-solving, infrastructure, working independently:
Maybe yes.

If you want: Predictable work:
No.

Infrastructure work is on-call, incident-driven.

You're managing systems that are... fragile.

But that's why the role exists.

To prevent (and handle) the fragility.

Welcome to the life of a sysadmin.

System Administrator: Gérer L'Infrastructure Que Personne Comprend