The Importance of Being Earnestly Automated

It was not long after I started in IT that I got the most important advice of my career. It came from a senior Unix system administrator in the team I’d just joined, and it shaped my career. In just eight words it stated the purpose of the system administrator, and I think IT as a whole:

The best system administrator is a lazy one.

On the face of it, it seems inappropriate advice: be lazy; yet that’s just the superficial reading of it. The real intent was this:

Automate everything you have to repeatedly do.

One of the reasons I was originally so blasé about Cloud was that it was old-hat. The same way that mainframe jockeys yawned and rolled their eyes when midrange people started talking about the wonders of virtualisation, I listened to people in IT extolling Cloud and found myself rolling my eyes – not just over the lack of data protection in early Cloud solutions – but to the stories about how Cloud was agile. And there’s no prizes for guessing where agility comes from: automation.

It surprises me twenty years on that the automation debate is still going on, and some people remain unconvinced.

There are three fundamental results of automation:

• Repeatability
• Reliability
• Verifiability

When something is properly automated, it can be repeated easily and readily. That’s a fundamental tenet driving Cloud agility: you click on a button on a portal and hey presto!, a virtual machine is spun up and you receive an IP address to access it from. Or you click on a button on a portal and suddenly you’ve got yourself a SQL database or Exchange server or CRM system or any one of hundreds of different applications or business functions. If there’s human intervention at the back-end between when you click the button and when you get your service it’s not agile. It’s not Cloud. And it’s certainly not automated. Well, not fully or properly.

With repeatability becomes reliability – accuracy. It doesn’t matter whether the portal has been up for 1 hour or 1000 hours, it doesn’t matter whether it’s 01:00 or 13:00, and it doesn’t matter how many requests the portal has got: it’s not prone to error, it won’t miss a check-box because it’s rushed or tired or can’t remember what the correct option is. It doesn’t matter whether the computer doing the work in the background has never done it before because it’s just been added to the resource pool, or whether it’s done the process a million times before. Automation isn’t just about repeatability, it’s about reliable repeatability.

Equally as importantly, with automation – with repeatability – there comes verifiability. Not only can you reliably repeat the same activity time and time again, but every time it’s executed you can verify it was executed. You can monitor, measure and report. This can be from the simplest – verifying it was performed successfully or throwing an exception for a human to investigate – to the more complex, such as tracking and reporting the trends on how long it takes automated processes to complete, so you can see keep an eye on how the system is scaling.

Once you’ve got automation in place, you’ve freed up your IT staff from boring and repetitive duties. That’s not to remove them from their jobs, but to let the humans in your staff do the jobs humans do best: those involving dealing with the unexpected, or thinking of new solutions. Automated, repeatable tasks are best left to scripts and processes and even robots (when it comes to production). The purpose of being a lazy system administrator was not so that you could sit at your desk doing nothing all day, but so you could spend time handling exceptions and errors, designing new systems, working on new projects, and yes, automating new systems.

Automation is not just a Cloud thing. Automation is not just a system administration thing. Or a database/application administration thing. Or a build thing. Or a…

Automation is everything in IT, particularly in the infrastructure space. Cloud has well and truly raised the profile of automation, but the fundamental concept is not new. I’d go so far as to say that if your business isn’t focused on automation, you’re doing IT wrong.