Middleware administrator — a man with several hats

Unlike a database administrator or UNIX system administrator — a middleware administrator has to be knowledgeable in several areas and perform a lot of tasks to keep applications up and available. You have to know how the application works and understand its dependencies. The most trivial applications have database access, and hence you must be proficient in database technologies such as JDBC and SQL. You have to understand messaging systems and key technologies such as various web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Most applications employ different security mechanisms, such as using an LDAP Server, thus you have to know the basics of security infrastructure.

With modern application complexities, you have to be agile and you need the right sets of tools and practices.

If you are a middleware administrator then you know how your life goes! Some of the typical tasks that middleware administrators perform are as follows:

You may ask the question — how do you juggle between these tasks? What is the optimal ratio of these tasks? There are no right answers here. This is actually based on your organization. We have seen administrators just struggling to keep up with monitoring the production middleware platform and making it highly available. This typically happens if you do not use the right tools and practices. Administrators spend most of their morning running several scripts to verify the health of their middleware platform. If you spend your entire morning checking the health of your middleware platform, then it is highly unlikely that you will be able to perform all of your tasks in your eight hour daily job!

Another challenge is that many organizations do not have full-time people who are middleware administrators. In some organizations, the database administrators or developers take on additional responsibilities for middleware administration. If you are part of such an organization then it is really challenging for you to perform all aspects of middleware management without the appropriate management tools.