Chapter 12. Automation
Progressive improvement beats delayed perfection.
—Mark Twain
Automation is when computers do work for us. The desire for automation historically has been motivated by three main goals: more precision, more stability, and more speed. Other factors, such as increased safety, increased capacity, and lower costs are desired side effects of these three basic goals. As a system administrator, automating the work that needs to be done should account for the majority of your job. We should not make changes to the system; rather, we should instruct the automation to make those changes.
Manual work has a linear payoff. That is, it is performed once and has benefits once. By comparison, time spent automating has a benefit every time ...
Get Practice of Cloud System Administration, The: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
