Chris Boos on Automation

Surfing our intranet I was totally surprised to find one of our administrators – Thomas “thommy” Neuderth - writing about his first contact with automation. I am really happy that one of the best IT experts I had the pleasure of working with has found himself having “no fear of being automated away” and rather interprets automation as a good way to actually live the life of an “IT expert” instead of being an “IT nanny”.

The automation of a simple task like archiving logfiles obviously convinced a “real techie” that there is more than just a little upside to using an automation engine. Of course the implementation of automation actually forced quite a bit of rethinking the common ways of administration and “thommy” describes the skepticism the first contact and the actual adoption of change in a down to earth way. If you are interested, you may read the whole document here.

Well, what a very basic question… Should we be discussing automation engines, when we should not have trust in them automatically taking action? Surely not, and obviously we are discussing automation engines.

So why do I hear so much about the lack of trust towards automated actions? It may be a stunning change in the field of system administration, that some entity takes automatic action where normally a system administrator would have typed in a couple of commands up to now. And change always induces fear and prejudice. Questions like “do you really trust the engine to restart this business critical service?” are not really uncommon. Well why should the machine not do that? After all the only action a system administrator would have taken is to restart the whole machine instead of just the service?

This simple every day example shows the real problem: Trust

We seem to have a problem when faced with the necessity to trust a machine or some lower level of reactive “intelligence”. Maybe this is just due to the many science fiction books we have read on robots and machines gone mad. In the end we are the ones who gave the engine the rule set by which it acts.

Actually we trust in automation every day we step into a lift. Much more than that, we rely on hard wired automation when we breathe or when our heart beats. I think none of us would be too happy about the idea of having to think and act out every breath and heartbeat consciously and willingly. Not much difference in automated actions in IT administration - and just like you can hold your breath automated actions can be overridden at any time.

This sounds very logical, doesn´t it? But logic is not the drink for “unsinkable rubber ducks” (the term true believer nowadays it too closely connected to politics - and besides much less enjoyable). So a good argument usually does not help much. In order to get on with automation either management uses force or try to employ man´s oldest habit - laziness (maybe we could get entangled in a discussion on greed or laziness being around first). And do not get me wrong, great things like the wheel were invented because of laziness. And on the way, we build trust towards automation in a non intrusive way - i.e. everyone involved can discover for himself that automation helps and is not evil. So this is how it is done:

1. Setup the automation engine in full
2. Disable all automated commands and redirect them to a trouble ticket or service management tool.
3. Have administrators use this tool and hence make them see what the engine would have done.
4. After a while people will start to copy and past the commands form the trouble ticket or service management tool into the various command lines.
5. This is the time to enable automatic command execution. The connection to the service management or trouble ticket system stays as it is. So the commands executed are not in any way “block boxed”.
6. There will not be mistrust and all the discussions, bad feelings and politics attached to it.

As discussed before, automation in IT operations definitely has a strong social impact. It is a question of how IT professionals deal with the change that will make the difference in the end.

As I spent most of last week at an American University, I obviously had quite some discussions on how automation impacts the lives of IT administrators. There seems to be a lot of personal discomfort (understandably). Unfortunately these personal issues get mixed up with the technical ones. Many people have asked me questions like “do you trust the machine to stop a service, restart a machine or even allocate resources dynamically?” Well, yes I do. I have trusted my system for quite some time to allocate memory and disk space for me and so have you and we are trusting computer programs to land planes, control elevators and life support systems in an ER. So why – WHY – should we not trust a machine to do something radical like rebooting a server?

In my opinion a machine has two major advantages over a human administrator in standard situations. First it never executes radical commands due to “gut feeling” (like boot feels good) and second it documents the path it took to reach to conclusion that executing specific commands is a good idea. So you do have documentation (hello to all you SOX consultants out there) and if there really is an error you know where to look and you will be able to change you rule set accordingly.

Ok, so maybe we can solve the problem of trust through logical argument. Unfortunately some people are very much resistant to logic. So another approach we sometimes take is to do a dry run. That means, we install the automation engine and disable all execution and redirect the execution command to document everything it would do into a trouble-ticket. As soon as administrators start pasting commands out of the tickets you know it is time to enable the real automation.

But let us get down to the actual administrators and the consequences all that automation has on them. There is this geek shirt “Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script”. By the way, the guy in the picture is actually one of our administrators - one of the guys who really DO automation. I think the shirt was done to scare off users. But nowadays this is actually what will happen to administrators who do not want to be part of this changing world. In my vision of the future there will only be two kinds of administrative staff close to a data center: Real IT experts (the Gurus) and janitors. The experts are today´s administrators who want to get rid of all the boring – I have done that about 10.000 times – tasks and deal with the exciting stuff instead. Well the others …..

To get it straight: I actually do not think that there will be fewer jobs in IT administration in the future, mainly because IT is an ever growing plant. I do think that there will be a lot less “boring” and unqualified work in IT – as we have seen in all other industries. Before.

So, is that really a bad thing? More exciting tasks, more real results, more happy administrators? I don´t think so… Let´s get it on guys

I know it. So does does Dave Bartlett @ IBM. <SHORT_PEEK>

I wish Dave had given more information about their showcase.

But wait, doesn’t this showcase sound familiar to me? Yes, I knew it. The “Microsoft Home of the future” <READ_HERE>. Interesting. These ‘home’ thing is a good idea to create a personal relationship between the customers/partners and the vendors technology and research.

Roland

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.

Automation in IT is about the last part on the IT landscape not under constant renewal - and this will come to an end soon.

It is about time technology becomes part of the change process…

IT has gained tremendous influence in everyday life and “we” - the IT crowd - are proud of “our” technology changing the world. But to put it out bluntly, IT itself has not changed that much and it is about time to pick up the pace.

Sure marketing has improved very much but most good concepts in IT have a very long life (e.g. virtual machines). On the other hand many IT trends are focused on an oscillating movement between polar architectural concepts e.g. host vs. PC vs. Client Server vs. Web vs. Web Services, vs. Web 2.0 and so on. Still the way the technical community handles IT did not change much. You may say that there have been a lot of changes all the while and that is certainly true. But these changes were mostly focused on development and creating cool interfaces. How about the concepts, techniques and social patterns applying to the operational environment? How about those of us who keep “IT” running? Not much change detected here….

Either we change or we are changed (away?)…

Do you know anyone (not from an IT profession) who is really happy with the way the IT around him works? Do you know people who believe their system administrator to be the greatest guy since Frank Sinatra? No, or why else would we need “Sysadmin appreciation day”? It seems that the people in and around IT operation are simply detached from the rest of the world. As IT becomes an integral part of “the rest of the world” just this world will not accept to depend on totally alienated concepts and people.

In IT it is still en vogue to be “god” of the system. Would anyone in any other industry accept the fact that the guy who runs the assembly line claims to be “god” of the place? No way and if there were such a guy - well in a positive environment he would be set up for counseling and in a bald world he would simply be sacked. So let´s face it, IT has worked its way into everyday life and cannot be alien anymore. Change is in the air. And if user complaints cannot do the job, controllers certainly will. Cost cutting initiatives have reduced IT operating budgets drastically. Still, just maintaining the status quo swallows up roughly 70% of all available IT budgets.

On the other hand, the guys I am just writing about are being bored to tears with everyday work and keep their sanity by building fancy tools just for themselves. Still for that rare occasion, when sh*t really hits the fan we are all happy these people are around, people who really know their way and understand the system. What an incredible squandering of talent, creativity and know how….

… a glimpse at the future

So finally we have arrived at a point where the way things are handled will be changed. IT operation no longer is a question of finding a cool new tool to sit in front of, but it is a question of having IT maintenance controlled by tools and processes - just like the work of so many other productive and creative people is controlled by machine driven processes.

In all other industries this is called automation and it is catching up with us. So if we want to be the gurus, we have to be part of the change process, we have to drive it and we have to find the technologies to enable the automation of IT operation and maintenance - after we are content with the fact that change is a good (and unavoidable) development.