
Runbook: A Ruby DSL for Gradual System Automation - blesi
https://medium.com/braintree-product-technology/https-medium-com-braintree-product-technology-runbook-be6f072cfc0d
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weaksauce
Looks pretty well thought out and useful and the documentation is great. can
you elaborate on what you use it for at braintree?

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blesi
We use it to automate or semi-automate a broad range of tasks that can't be
accomplished within the context of a single app or system.

For example, we have a pretty extensive pre-flight deployment checklist for
our applications that are in PCI scope in order to ensure we meet compliance
requirements and reduce human error to provide a high degree of reliability to
our customers. This checklist includes a number of sanity checks to ensure we
are deploying the correct code, that it has been thoroughly tested, that it
has received the necessary sign-offs, that contingency plans are in place, and
that we have appropriate monitoring in place.

Some of these steps are automated such as launching monitoring dashboards and
some steps cannot be automated and must be done by a human such as verifying
that appropriate contingency plans are in place. Our runbook walks our
developers through this process step-by-step and documents that all steps were
followed for future audits. Further it provides a low barrier to entry so
developers that are new to the team can execute deployments of our mission-
critical applications without extensive training. When our process changes,
for example when migrating our applications to kubernetes or introducing new
monitoring, we can make these changes without requiring developers to learn a
new process.

Another example where we've found runbooks invaluable is doing OS upgrades for
services in our datacenters. These operations have resisted full automation
due to slight variations in system configurations, however scripting them with
runbooks allows us to troubleshoot issues, build fixes into our runbooks, and
resume execution where we left off.

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weaksauce
That’s quite cool! Thanks for sharing

