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someone_eu | 3 years ago
Let me put it differently: Automating things significantly increases the cost of changing them.
While you are doing it manually, you have the knowledge, the flexibility and the power to change and adjust if needed. When automated, you lose knowledge, flexibility and control over the task.
It can be good or bad depending on the situation. When we talk about strictly defined actions with a high risk of human error, the automation is indeed necessary. Its power of resisting the change is helping us.
When you automate a fuzzy, volatile, complex decision-making logic, it becomes a curse rather than a blessing. It is almost impossible to do it correctly, with test coverage and verification and debugging and covering all of the corner cases.. (How often do you see proper QA for the infrastructure glue?) And even if you do invest enormous amount of resources, then you put all that knowledge of the process in a black box and lose the key. Which leads to the situations, where to change the process hidden in a box, people choose to create new layers of automations around it rather than look inside.
Refactoring a mess of a process is hard. But refactoring a mess, which has been automated, is simply impossible.
(Not saying this justifies the argument against Let's Encrypt though)
perrygeo|3 years ago
I've described this as the difference between traveling by train vs car.
When you're manually driving a car, you can go anywhere your tires are capable of driving. You have full freedom, full optionality, to change direction.
When you're sitting on a train (traveling by automation), there's a set schedule, set stations and pre-built tracks. There's no option to deviate from your itinerary at all. Moving train tracks takes too much time.
By laying the tracks up front, automation reduces control/visibility and ossifies your decisions in a way that limits future options. The tradeoff of is that you can sit back and read a magazine while a machine does the work.
People generally don't like to hear this - they immediately see the benefits but are very likely to ignore or brush off the additional complexities and contraints that automation adds.