The Dark Knight showed us what a psychopath could do with  gasoline, a match, and large piles of other people’s money. It seems insane to most people to burn Certificates of Performance (money) in this way.

“This is the story of how a company with nearly $400 million in assets went bankrupt in 45-minutes because of a failed deployment.”

Read the entire article here: https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/

This could have been prevented with more deployment / automated testing. Also when reading this I could not believe they repurposed an existing configuration flag to do something else. This seems overly risky when you can make a new configuration option that you understand the ramifications for and can easily add testing for the new usage scenarios.

We work in environments where a good checklist is probably sufficient. However, as the number of products grow or the environments become more complex then automation is the answer to make sure we deploy quality software in a reliable and consistent manner.

We probably all have stories where automation saved the day. The thing is if we have automated something properly you actually stop thinking about it. Adding automation takes time. First you need to understand how to do the process manually. Once that is done you have to determine the value of the automation and when to do it- this is the tricky part and where we have to make decisions based on the information at the time and our best judgement. There is an XYKZ illustration that can become reality if you are not careful.

Are there instances where you wish you had something automated?

Let us know in the comments below.