Docker isn't anything new (perhaps nicer toolset on an old idea), and admins aren't getting replaced by devs any faster than devs getting replaced by admins. If anything, the amount of work continues to get abstracted away for both camps.
Maybe you won't need sysadmins in ~10 years. Maybe. Those of us still doing IT will just pivot into another niche.
With more and more abstraction layers the things that could fuck up rise exponentially and are harder to track. So while you won't need 10 ops to be able to keep your servers up, you will need 10 trained IT investigators to find why java 12 inside docker 8.14 connecting to whatever nosql crashes when there is full moon.
Yes, the possiblities for bugs increase exponentialy. But no, that does not mean you'll need exponentialy more time tracking them. And that's not even the most important scaling factor: the point is that good abstractions are simple, and get reused enough so that they create very few interface bugs, and those bugs get resolved.
Have you worked with Docker in production? Managing tens of thousands of running containers isn't what I call "plug and play", and orchestration tools like Mesos don't make it as simple as people would like to believe.
I will admit great strides are being made, but all this handwaving that we're at some sort of "great push forward" is pretty laughable if you look at the history of computing.
If it's so, it's because Docker isn't a good abstraction. (And we can expect it to get eventually replaced by something that correctly solves the problem.)
We have plenty of examples of good abstraction already (programming languages, operational systems, databases...). After we get one, most people stop even thinking that it's prossible to program without them.
> We have plenty of examples of good abstraction already (programming languages, operational systems, databases...). After we get one, most people stop even thinking that it's prossible to program without them.
Right. And that's why we're how many versions of Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX in? PHP, Python, .Net, VB, Ruby, GoLang, Rust, Objective C, Swift.
Maybe you won't need sysadmins in ~10 years. Maybe. Those of us still doing IT will just pivot into another niche.