“back in the good old days, we used to fix everything by hand…”
This line is true not to your father or uncle but true to hi-tech veterans as well. the “good” old days where the sysadmin knew all commands by heart and knew how to do magic and fix every system problem with a set of bash commands. as time progressed the set of commands were gathered into small bash scripts named “run.sh” or “fixer.bash”. these were a list of commands. the command batches were traded secretly with no real guidance, just run this it will do the charm.
once the DevOps concept became common and developing methodology started penetrating the operations teams, these scripts grew larger, became clearer and even some had some user interface, mostly CLI based.
this kind of solutions is great for smaller organizations where the operations team are smaller. on smaller teams, it is easier to share the knowledge of how and when to use these scripts. once the team and the organization grows knowledge gaps are created. not all engineers will be fluent with the old scripts. new engineers will have a hard time to connect the script and the circumstances it is required.
This calls for a new type of system tools. active sytem tools that are clear and self-explanatory. new tools that are built to monitor, and operate the system at once. what was once CLI based needs to change to common API methods (REST for example) that will be used by a web-UI system.
the “new” system tools can be used by workflow engines to enable further automation of the system.
“ye shall bring forth the old from before the new”(Leviticus Chp. 26)
scripts were a great solution. it is time for new and more “developmental” system tools.