Automating systems provisioning and management

Automation is vital when we talk about systems and infrastructure administration. We don’t have any other area in IT services that can easily create toil and technical debts at alarming rates. If SREs don’t concentrate on making systems administration a streamlined process, soon they will not have enough people to take care of it.

There are two administrative tasks that can easily derail a whole system – provisioning and management. We will discuss the automation journey in more detail in Chapter 9, Valued Automation – Toil Discovery and Elimination. We will present a couple of practices that have changed the way we handle systems administration in the following sections:

• Infrastructure as Code
• Immutable infrastructure

Infrastructure as Code

The idea behind Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is very simple. What we do for apps when we code the business logic that will govern app behavior we...