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It's probably a page on the internal Wiki that the S3 team follows for that particular task. Most the actual steps are probably automated, but it sounds more like a checklist.

I used to follow runbooks/playbooks written on the internal wiki when I worked at Amazon.

I don't think it means "playbook" in the Ansible sense. The dictionary (i.e. Wikipedia) definition of "playbook" is "a document defining one or more business process workflows aimed at ensuring a consistent response to situations commonly encountered during the operation of the business", and that's how I know it.

At $work, certain types of frequently-occurring alerts have playbooks that document how the alert in question can be diagnosed and how known causes can be remedied. Something like "Look at Grafana dashboard X. If metric Y is doing this and that thing, the cause is Z. Log on to box 16 and systemctl restart the foo.service."

Hm, based on the description, I would be surprised if they could fat-finger that.

playbooks can take arguments: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30662069/how-can-i-pass-v...

So, fat-fingering something is imminently possible.