As another take — I'd say automate judiciously. If you're a team of one, the benefits of things like CI/CD and containers are reduced. They're definitely still

As another take — I'd say automate judiciously. If you're a team of one, the benefits of things like CI/CD and containers are reduced. They're definitely still worthwhile, but that needs to be weighed against how comfortable you are setting up/maintaining these to begin with. If they don't divert too much energy because you're already well versed in them, they're probably a win. But needing to shell into a couple of EC2 boxes & manually deploying/upgrading stuff might be a safer bet for some people. You don't want to answer a P1 ticket at 3am & be getting some esoteric Kubernetes error and have no-one to ask. I think it's tough to learn & adopt new ops tools as a team of one if they're things that are on the critical path.