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Not necessarily. If the script is documented and written cleanly (e.g Fabric3 which has very little magic, and reads almost like Bash), then in can server as "r
by ivan_ah 8y ago
Not necessarily. If the script is documented and written cleanly (e.g Fabric3 which has very little magic, and reads almost like Bash), then in can server as "runnable documentation". In this case automation could be really good for continuity and busfactor.
But yeah... got to put some effort into it. Like all docs, script-docs worn't write themselves.
- taneq 8y agoAgree that it's not unavoidable, but the problem is deeper than just the scripts themselves being well documented and straightforward. The main risk (IME, anyway) is awareness / discovery of the scripts in a timely manner - the fact that everything 'just works' means that it can be months or years before something breaks, at which point it may be too late to ask the person who set it up. Hopefully there's good handover from the outgoing staff member to a technically proficient colleague. If so then everything might be OK but if not then a catastrophic failure may well be the first sign that something is wrong. (A recent example of much simpler automation going horribly wrong was a company losing their top-level domain name because it was set to auto-renew using an ex-employee's personal credit card, and their email address as contact. This worked for years until that card was cancelled and the warning emails bounced off the closed account.)