> But it makes me wonder, is sysadmin a lost art?
Yes. 15-20 years ago when I was still working on network-adjacent stuff I witnessed the shift to the devops movement.
To be clear, the fact that devops don't plan for AWS failures isn't an indication that they lack the sysadmin gene. Sysadmins will tell you very similar "X can never go down" or "not worth having a backup for service Y".
But deep down devops are developers who just want to get their thing running, so they'll google/serveroverflow their way into production without any desire to learn the intricacies of the underlying system. So when something breaks, they're SOL.
"Thankfully" nowadays containers and application hosting abstracts a lot of it back away. So today I'd be willing to say that devops are sufficient for small to medium companies (and dare I say more efficient?).
