Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Automation and Tooling

Alex Chiang, Bharath, Daniel Hobe, Joanna W., Michael Harris, Michelle Brush, Robin Roth, and Trevor Mattson-Hamilton

with Carmela Quinito

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 13th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Automation is a key aspect of SRE. Instead of purely operating the systems they own, SREs engineer them. Many—if not all—operational tasks can be automated.

Reasons to automate include:

Saving time during normal operations

The main reason commonly given for automation is to save time. Productivity gurus can point out automatable aspects in any aspect of life and work. Any continuously running system comes with maintenance tasks. Daily or weekly tasks are very present to the engineers responsible for performing them, and it’s part of SRE culture to despise repetitive work and consider how to “automate yourself out of your current job”. While these types of tasks are top of mind, the frequency or annoyance of a task should often not be the top reason to automate it, without considering the three reasons that follow.