Site Reliability Engineering - Evolution of Automation

We explore the evolution of automation as we continue studying Google’s Site Reliability Engineering, while Michael, ah, forget it, Joe almost said it correctly, and Allen fell for it.

The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode187.

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Automation

Why Do We Automate Things?

The famous “SRE Book” from Google

• Consistency: Humans make mistakes, even on simple tasks. Machines are much more reliable. Besides, tasks like creating accounts, resetting passwords, applying updates aren’t exactly fun.
• Platform: Automation begets automation, smaller tasks can be tweaked or combined into bigger ones.
  • Pays dividends, providing value every time it’s used as opposed to toil which is essentially a tax.
  • Platforms centralize logic too, making it easier to organize, find, and fix issues.
  • Automation can provide metrics, measurements that can be used to make better decisions.
• Faster Repairs: The more often automation runs, it hits the same problems and solutions which brings down the average time to fix. The more often the process runs, the cheaper it becomes to repair.
• Faster Actions: Automations are faster than humans. Many automations would be prohibitively expensive for humans to do,
• Time Saving: It’s faster in terms of actions, and anybody can run it.

If we are engineering processes and solutions that are not automatable, we continue having to staff humans to maintain the system. If we have to staff humans to do the work, we are feeding the machine