Hello engineers!

The primary role of a systems engineer is building and managing IT infrastructure for hosting applications and their data. In the olden days, the number of applications used was a lot less, hence the infrastructure size. As the applications and components grew, the IT infrastructure also grew, and systems engineers and system administrators started experiencing resource conjunction. In other ways, systems engineers are spending more time on building, maintaining, and supporting the infrastructure rather than spending time on improving the infrastructure designs and optimizing them.

For the support team, 90% of the event tickets are simple fixes including disk space full, user account locked, volumes not mounted, and so on. But the support engineer still needs to manually log in to each and every server and fix the issues one by one.

The task can be fixing a low disk space issue on servers, installing some packages, patching OSs, creating virtual machines, or resetting a user password; engineers are doing the same job repeatedly for multiple systems, and this led to the invention of automated operations. Initially, the solution for automation was custom scripts developed and maintained by individual engineers, but it was never a real solution for the enterprises as there was no collaboration, maintenance, or accountability for such custom automation scripts. If the developer leaves the organization, the script will become an orphan and the next engineer will create their own custom scripts.

With the introduction of DevOps methodologies and practices, developers, systems engineers, operations teams, and other platform teams started working together, the boundaries between them became thinner, and a better accountable ecosystem evolved. Everyone started building and maintaining the applications and the underlying IT infrastructure, which, in turn, made the automation use case list bigger and more complex.