I'm all about IT automation and like the tech a lot, but after running SaltStack for 5 years, I decided to transition to plain old written documentation. When you consider everything that underlies the "infrastructure as code" tech stack, it ends up being an extremely steep learning curve. I was very productive with SaltStack but turned into the only person who could write or edit our deployment scripts. It was a bad situation.

Now, nine months after dropping SaltStack, my colleagues are editing the docs I've created, and more importantly, they're also writing their own. That's a huge win. What I've lost in terms of personal productivity, I've regained in terms of wider participation in our standardization and documentation efforts.

I might slowly re-introduce IT automation technologies, maybe something more popular like Ansible or Docker, but only after making sure the rest of my team has a solid understanding of general IT automation concepts. I think we're on the right track. I had a colleague today ask me about what Python programming certification they should get, so I pointed them toward Google's Python-based IT automation course on Coursera. I supported another colleague's efforts to create a library of standard server images based on our internal deployment standards for one of our private clouds, and I'm encouraging them to expand that work to our other data centers. And so on. The team as a whole works better together, so that's where I'm staying focused.