Using os/exec to automate local changes
Automating the execution of tools that are local to the machine can provide a series of benefits to end users. The first of these is that it can reduce the toil that your team experiences. One of the primary goals for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) is to remove repetitive, manual processes. That time can be put to better use by reading a good book (such as this one), organizing a sock drawer, or working on the next problem. The second benefit is to remove manual mistakes from a process. It is easy to type the wrong thing or copy and paste something incorrectly. And finally, it is the core underpinning of operating at scale. Automating locally can be combined with other techniques detailed in the book to make changes at a large scale.
The automation life cycle generally comes in three stages, moving from manually doing work to automation, as follows:
- The first stage revolves around the manual execution of commands by an...
