[mumblemumble]

In the software development realm, the biggest spot I see automation paying off is when it fosters consistency.

To take an example from operations: To me (admittedly speaking from the developer side of things), the overwhelming benefit of containerization has nothing to do with elasticity or scaling or really any of the marketing buzzwords. The real benefit is that Docker and friends encourage presenting a much more consistent management surface to the operations team. In the short run, this is just the price of automation. In the long run, this greatly reduces the mental burden of understanding how all the individual pieces are configured and deployed.

Most of that was never anything but incidental complexity. I doubt that ops's job has actually become any easier over the past 20 years. But, even so, if they're spending less time just shaving yaks, that suggests that a greater proportion of what they're doing is genuinely valuable.

[bravetraveler]

As someone in operations, totally this. Consistency is the biggest thing.

I've worked with plenty of wizards that can figure anything/everything out, but these deviations have a hidden cost.

The farm of resources no longer behaves like cattle, it's all pets - with their own identities, personalities, etc.

Containers abstract most of this away, a simple runtime and any host can be just like another with a tiny amount of automation.

We get things like scale from this, but if it 'works on your machine' but not ours, we're no further.