10 Rules of Automation

How to make better automation,

Transcript

1. 10 rules of automation The value of automation comes from both what it does and its judicious application. Google’s Site Reliability Engineering
2. Patrick Robinson Development Operations Engineer @ Envato @DrNemski ~ Twitter
4. Goals
5. 1. Reduce toil “Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.” - Site Reliability Engineering
6. 2. Build resilient automation “one could build a service that alerts its SREs several time day where each alert requires a complex response involving plenty of human judgement… [this] is definitely toil” - Site Reliability Engineering
7. 3. Build systems that are easy to reason about
8. How to get there
9. 4. Prefer small tools “Do one thing do it well” ~ old unix proverb
10. Five stages of (im)mutability
11. Pets
12. Wagyu beef
13. Frankenstein
14. Sir Nutkin
15. Unicorn
16. 6. Design modular systems Build artifact Run tests Deploy to production Run tests
17. 7. Composed of loosely coupled components
18. Caveats
19. Don’t implement an automated process that requires unnecessary manual intervention 8. Avoid automation fatigue
20. 9. Don’t just automate a complex error prone process Cyclical dependencies between applications Unreliable api requests (especially asynchronous requests)
21. 10. Avoid re-inventing the wheel If the tool only does 95% of what you need it to, do the other 5% in Bash