Chapter 8: Automating Command-Line Tasks
Most jobs start out as some type of manual operation that an engineer performs. Over time, these should become documented procedures that have the best practice for doing some operation, and finally, that job should become the work of software that takes those best practices and runs them with the efficiency that only a machine can provide.
One of the core missions of a development-operations (DevOps) engineer is automating these tasks. This can be from the mundane, such as running a few commands, to changing the configuration on thousands of machines.
Automating systems often requires manipulating a system via its command line and calling other tools native to the operating system (OS). This can include using RPM Package Manager (RPM)/Debian Package (dpkg) for installing packages, grabbing stats for a system using common utilities, or configuring network routers.
A DevOps engineer may want to do this locally to automate a series of...
