Title: 10 rules of automation

Description:

The basis of the talk comes from Patrick's experience automating the wrong way, and the things he's learned doing it again. It's easy to look at a problem and think "I know I'll automate it!". This can be an easy trap to fall into. Automation does not make robust maintainable platforms; but when combined with a well grounded knowledge of building systems (particularly distributed systems) is a powerful tool. Patrick will explore the common pitfalls:

• automating error prone processes
• choosing the wrong tool
• overly complex automation
• automating pets
• placing your automation at the wrong end of the pipeline

In the end Patrick hopes to show participants how automation, used judiciously, can be extremely effective. Patrick will likely also delve into a recent project he worked on, successfully migrating an Alexa top 1000 site to AWS.