Valued Automation – Toil Discovery and Elimination
In recent years, enterprises of all sizes have funded their business process automation projects. Although the reasons for such investments are decreasing operational costs (CapEx and OpEx) and gaining agility, often the approach adopted for that effort has not been fruitful. A similar situation is found in IT operational work automation, where manual and repetitive tasks are still necessary to keep systems running. Such chores increase the likelihood of error and consume the precious time of engineering teams. Site reliability engineers (SREs) have a special relationship with automation because of how it affects reliability.
An essential step in site reliability engineering adoption is automating operations and experimenting with coding. However, automation should never be a site reliability engineer’s goal, but eliminating toil is. Toil is a type of work that is repetitive enough to use unnecessary energy from the...
