Let’s Re-Run the Runbook!
Runbook Automation: Why replay this story now?
If you are a grizzled veteran of the pre-Internet-age IT world, when you think of runbooks, you might picture binders full of instructions for mainframe reboots and system workarounds sitting in the server room, right next to the night Ops manager’s TV dinner and 13” TV playing a re-run of The Carol Burnett Show.
Fast-forward to today, where complex n-tier applications are defined by developers with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) automation scripts such as Ansible, Chef and Terraform, then delivered in hybrid IT environments that can span on-premises servers, managed infrastructure and cloud-based services with ephemeral containers and microservices.
A lot has changed since then, especially our ability to deliver more application releases to production, faster. The DevOps movement led to ever-higher levels of business agility and automation, including the advent of the SRE (Site Reliability Engineer, or Service Reliability Engineer) role.
After dutifully driving automation into every aspect of testing, deployment, monitoring and IT service management, SREs and Ops teams are still getting their pagers blown up every day.
What happened to the business continuity we expected from a modern infrastructure, and why are we still getting hammered with urgent tickets? The drive for always-on applications has never been higher.
We need to equip both our expert SREs and new “you build it, you run it” DevOps teams with purposeful control over any our applications or platforms at a moment’s notice. In today’s post COVID-19 world, we are all too aware that needed
subject matter experts may be unavailable. Therefore, we have to equip others with the power to fill in during an incident or other critical activity.
Runbook automation is a channel to IT value worth watching right now. We can reinvent the valuable knowledge and processes locked in runbooks, with renewed intelligence to help manage all the IT work required for successful operations.
Hell, HBO Max paid $425 Million to stream re-runs of the 90s sitcom Friends. What’s old shall be born anew.
Let’s re-run the runbook! Download the entire whitepaper by Jason English, Principal Analyst at Intellyx.
