On Automation

In SRE and DevOps, we have heavily adopted automation. I was drawn into the field because it did not make sense to do repetitive tasks that machines could do for me.?

It is so strong that catchphrases like "Automate all the things!" and "Automate yourself out of a job" are common sentiments of people like me.

So what tradeoffs have we made moving into our autonomous future??

With automation, we make things:

• repeatable
• scalable
• autonomous (requiring no human intervention)

We also:

• Scale our mistakes
• Add complexity?
• Lose low-level experience with the system

?Building automation is key to the long-term success of our software-driven world, but we should learn from other disciplines to actively mitigate its downsides.?

Until next week

Robert