Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Automation and Tooling

By Alex Chiang, Bharath Modhipalli, Daniel Hobe, Joanna Wijntjes, Michael Harris, Michelle Brush, Robin Roth, and Trevor Mattson-Hamilton with Carmela Quinito

Automation is a key aspect of SRE. SREs should strive to engineer the systems they own rather than simply operate 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 practically 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 likely the first that come to mind, the frequency or annoyance of a task should not be the sole motivating factor; consider also the three reasons that follow.

Saving time in emergencies

Automation can reduce the time it takes to detect, triage, mitigate, or resolve an incident. While the savings in terms of time might seem small, their business impact can be large. Ensuring that a full outage of a large online shop on Cyber Monday gets mitigated after 5 instead of 15 minutes will likely be more important to the business than cutting an hour from a weekly release qualification process. Some tight ...