ericsysmin's DevOps Blog

Automate Everything

Ok, almost automate everything. I do recognize that this far into DevOps there are some things you can’t quite automate. But for the most part you can stick to these few rules. If your situation matches any of these, you could probably automate it with a script.

  • The same actions are performed often, more than 3 times.
  • You want to outsource advanced actions to a tier 1 team.
  • You want to allow developers or non-technical people perform the actions.
  • You want a way to make sure the same actions are done whenever something is ran
  • Source control has a huge benefit, I script just about everything, just so I can upload it to source control and roll back a script if there’s a bad change.

Some languages that are really common in DevOps land include Bash, Python, Powershell (my Windows friends), and Ruby, however, I have seen DevOpsers use Java, Perl, Go, and many other languages. Over 6 years and 3 companies, I’ve only seen Bash, Python, Powershell, and Ruby used within those companies.