Summary
In this chapter, we understood what toil is and what it is not by redefining it slightly differently from the original Google definition. Repetitive and manual tasks are always burdensome from an SRE’s point of view, and SREs must identify, measure, and eliminate them whenever possible. Automation is an elegant answer for automatable toil, and resolving it as a software problem is a good practice. We dissected CI/CD pipeline automation. Finally, we consolidated the knowledge of this chapter by going through the application build simulation lab available in the GitHub repository.
After reading this chapter, you should be able to explain toil and automation through an SRE’s eyes and how SREs detect and eliminate manual, repetitive, and automatable chores that can drain energy and inhibit growth: documenting runbooks and scripting them for automation. You should also be able to explain how the CI/CD pipeline works and the automation requirements for it, and know...
