Human-in-the-Loop DevOps (ADDO Edition)

A presentation at All Day DevOps by Taylor Barnett

Automation has become our North Star. And while we want to automate the toil away, the goal of no toil is unattainable. Many tasks and processes can only be partially automated because they still require human intervention and insights. It is time to look at automation through a different lens.

Human-in-the-Loop DevOps is the idea that we can benefit from automating toil while still embracing human adaptability. In this talk, we’ll take a critical look at end-to-end automation while discussing common patterns of tasks that can be fully automated, like health checks and monitoring, and ones that cannot, like incident response and coordination. We’ll share examples of pulling humans into the loop at critical junctures, and that allows humans to add maximal value while automating the tedium. And lastly, we’ll discuss how Human-in-the-Loop DevOps can lower cognitive load and improve the on-call experience.