Re:Automation is the serialization of understanding
by jiggawatts on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @05:30AM
(#31094511)
I’ve made arguments both ways in the past but after decades I’ve started leaning towards “80% automated”.
The idea is to get to the point that you can tear down everything and rebuild it in an hour or so. This doesn’t need 100% automation, which can be cost-prohibitive as you’ve mentioned.
The cost benefit of partial automation is that it enables rapid iteration of things like naming conventions, container hierarchies, build order, and demarcations of when things are done.
I’m working right now on an Azure template for two(!) VMs. I could deploy these by hand in an hour. Instead I’m reusing snippets from a previous project that in turn reused snippets from another.
This lets me get “for free” all of the lessons-learned from those projects: The fiddly monitoring setup. The safety locks. Purge protection. Log archival.
The customer isn’t even sure what they want! I’ll probably have to iterate and redeploy this several times before the solution congeals. With a template this takes mere minutes per iteration.
So the lesson here is that it’s not about then final scale, but about the scale of the workflow required to finalise the entire solution end-to-end.
The idea is to get to the point that you can tear down everything and rebuild it in an hour or so. This doesn’t need 100% automation, which can be cost-prohibitive as you’ve mentioned.
The cost benefit of partial automation is that it enables rapid iteration of things like naming conventions, container hierarchies, build order, and demarcations of when things are done.
I’m working right now on an Azure template for two(!) VMs. I could deploy these by hand in an hour. Instead I’m reusing snippets from a previous project that in turn reused snippets from another.
This lets me get “for free” all of the lessons-learned from those projects: The fiddly monitoring setup. The safety locks. Purge protection. Log archival.
The customer isn’t even sure what they want! I’ll probably have to iterate and redeploy this several times before the solution congeals. With a template this takes mere minutes per iteration.
So the lesson here is that it’s not about then final scale, but about the scale of the workflow required to finalise the entire solution end-to-end.