The "Automate everything" mentality tends to come from developers who are not yet really experienced enough to know what value automation is bringing. I'm a developer and I love automation of things, but I also know that some things don't automate well (self-healing systems are great, but at this point in time they mostly fail in interesting ways, which is one of the reasons SREs exist).
Automation also doesn't mean a system is actually of value. I've seen plenty of automation that has made life harder and incidents more common. It's also meant that some systems have been designed in a sub-par way, just to shoehorn automation in.
The mantra "automate everything" should be a nice rule of thumb, but not followed with any dogma.
Automation also doesn't mean a system is actually of value. I've seen plenty of automation that has made life harder and incidents more common. It's also meant that some systems have been designed in a sub-par way, just to shoehorn automation in.
The mantra "automate everything" should be a nice rule of thumb, but not followed with any dogma.