Practice of Cloud System Administration, The: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2

by Thomas A. Limoncelli

There is a popular misconception that the goal of automation is to do tasks faster than they could be done manually. That is just one of the goals. Other goals include the following: • Help scaling. Automation is a workforce multiplier. It permits one person to do the work of many. • Improve accuracy. Automation is less error prone than people are. Automation does not get distracted or lose interest, nor does it get sloppy over time. Over time software is improved to handle more edge cases and error situations. Unlike hardware, software gets stronger over time (Spolsky 2004, p. 183). • Increase repeatability. Software is more consistent than humans when doing tasks. Consistency is part of a well-controlled environment. • Improve reliability. Once a process is automated, it is easier to collect statistics and metrics about the process. These data can then be used to identify problems and improve reliability. • Save time. There is never enough time to do all the work that needs to be done. An automated task should require less SA time than a manual one. • Make processes faster. Manual processes are slower because they involve thinking and typing. Both are error prone and correcting mistakes often has a large time penalty itself. • Enable more safeguards. Adding additional pre- and post-checks to an automated process is easy. Doing so incurs a one-time cost, but improves the automation for all future iterations of the process. Adding more checks to a manual process adds a bur...

Goals of automation follow