"In a traditional IT ops culture, sysadmin "cowboys" would often SSH into production boxes, wrangling systems by making a bunch of random and unrepeatable changes, and then riding off into the sunset. Enterprises have spent more than a decade recovering from cowboy chaos through the use of tools such as configuration management, immutable infrastructure, CI/CD, and strict access controls. But, now, the cowboy has ridden back into town-in the form of agentic AI."
"Agentic AI promises sysadmins fewer manual tickets and on‑call fires to fight. Indeed, it's nice to think that you can hand over the reins to a large language model (LLM), prompting it to, for example, log into a server to fix a broken app at 3 a.m. or update an aging stack while humans are having lunch. The problem is that an LLM is, by definition, non‑deterministic:"
"I know, first-hand, that burning tokens is addictive. This weekend, I was troubleshooting a problem on one of my servers, and I'll admit that I got weak, installed Claude Code, and used it to help me troubleshoot some systemd timer problems. I also used it to troubleshoot a problem I was having with a container, and with validating an application with Google. It's so easy to become reliant on it to help us with problems on our systems."
Agentic AI can automate operational tasks but introduces risk when given direct control over production systems. Non-deterministic LLM outputs can produce different packages, configs, or deployment steps for the same prompt, recreating unrepeatable system states. Enterprises previously mitigated manual 'cowboy' changes using configuration management, immutable infrastructure, CI/CD, and strict access controls. Allowing LLMs to modify live servers can undo those protections and reintroduce instability. AI agents can be useful for proposing changes to image definitions, playbooks, or artifacts when subject to review. Human oversight and guardrails must prevent autonomous actions on production, especially when teams are short-handed.
Read at InfoWorld
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]