> Your arguments contradict themselves - if the infrastructure is changing then there's little point spending the time automating your response to its failure.

> Your arguments contradict themselves - if the infrastructure is changing then there's little point spending the time automating your response to its failure. OP said automating runbooks, and any fixes to production--so the code becomes the documentation of how to deploy, and what exactly was done to remedy an error. OP did not say automating failure responses. Which brings up OP's proposed question... >> I don't understand how that is possible? Could you give an example of a task that can't be automated? Could you give a concrete example? There's a vague reference in the article about automating responses for encoding errors which sounds interesting. It sounds like the system generates lots of server errors, and it's easier/cheaper to communicate them to customers directly instead of making code fixes.