Often automating IT is handled as an obscure Art. Maybe some regard it as the black magic of the 21^st century. When I don’t understand things, I tend to divide and then conquer them, so in this case why black and why magic? Maybe black, because automation is regarded as something evil by quite a few IT people. Good techies could lose their jobs or at least their “God” status, when automation actually works. And maybe magic, because automation is clear to us viewed on a single system – i.e. things you didn’t want to do manually are put into a script and voila the system does them automatically – but in a large IT environment, all of a sudden things seem to happen by themselves.

But let me tell you, IT automation is neither black, nor magic. It is not magic, because after all it can be broken down just to that simple script example above. So if you divide the automation of a large IT environment you will in the end arrive at one – or maybe more – scripts being executed under certain conditions. So the question – I guess we will be talking about that in a little while – is which script or scripts to execute under what condition. And automation is not black, because “people losing their jobs or their current status” is nothing evil but the way our world works. Change is the driving force of everything and anybody trying to position himself against the power of change will definitely loose in the long term. So I would recommend embracing the ideas of automation rather than putting it down there with devils and demons – and by the way we do have enough of the latter around in IT anyway.