Practice of Cloud System Administration, The: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2
by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan
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 ...
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