Automation - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 254

Thelogsfromtheautomation wereusedtodrivebusinessdecisions.Downtime
was improved dramatically by accelerating the move away from a model of hard-
ware that proved to be the least reliable.
12.4 Creating Automation
Automation has many benefits, but it requires dedicated time and effort to create. Auto-
mation, like any programming, is best created during a block of time where there are no
outside interruptions. Sometimes there is so much other work to be done that it is difficult
to find a sufficient block of time to focus on creating the automation. You need to delib-
erately make the time to create the automation, not hope that eventually things will quiet
down sufficiently so that you have the time.
In a well-run team, the majority of the team's time should be spent creating and main-
taining automation, rather than on manual tasks. When manual tasks start to become the
greater part of the workload, it is time to take a step back and see how new automation
might restore the balance. It is important to be able to identify which automation will have
the biggest impact, and to tackle that first. It is also important to understand the places
where automation is not appropriate.
12.4.1 Making Time to Automate
Sometimes there isn't enough time to automate because we're so busy with urgent work
that blocks long-term work such as creating automation. To use an analogy, we don't have
time to shut off the leaking faucet because we're spending all of our time mopping the
floor. When this happens, it can be difficult to get ourselves out of the rut and fix the root
causes that prevent us from having a healthy amount of time to create automation.
Here are some suggestions for making the time to work on automation:
• Get management involved. Managers should reprioritize the work to emphasize
automation.
• Find the top thing that is wrecking your ability to get the big things done and fix,
mitigate, or eliminate it. This may mean ignoring other work for a time—even let-
ting some things fail for a bit—while you fix the leaking faucet.
• Eliminate rather than automate. Find work that can be eliminated. For example,
spot tasks that you do on behalf of other people and push the responsibilities back
onto those people. Eliminate duplicate effort. For example, if you are maintaining
10 different Linux versions, maybe you would be best served by narrowing that
number down to only a few, or one.