Eliminating toil through automation

Toil was introduced in Chapter 1, DevOps, SRE, and Google Cloud Services for CI/CD, and is defined as the work tied to a production service where the characteristic of that work is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, lacks enduring value, and linearly grows with the service. Toil is often confused with overhead, but overhead refers to administrative work that includes email, commute, filing expense reports, and attending meetings. Toil can be both good and bad—it really depends on the amount of toil.

Here are some of the positive sides of performing toil, but in very short and limited amounts:

• Produces a sense of gratification or a sense of accomplishment
• Can act as a low-stress or low-risk activity
• Can be used to train new recruits, especially providing them a chance to learn by being hands-on with the system to learn the inner workings

However, excessive toil can lead to the following problems or issues...