Automation is not a pile of scripts; it is what makes an environment reproducible and safe to change. I write about Ansible and its limits, about designing playbooks that survive team turnover, and about wiring automation into request handling processes.
Passwords in playbooks, tokens in pipeline variables, Secrets created by hand in the cluster. How a small team can move secrets into one source and deliver them to consumers without storing values in the repository.
A script run every night by Task Scheduler is a production service, even if it is a hundred lines long. How to write it so that a successor knows what it does and the scheduler knows whether it succeeded.
A playbook written by one person grows to several thousand lines and takes on jobs Ansible was never meant for. Where to use it, where not to, and how to lay out the repository so that a successor understands it within an hour.
Granting access to a share takes a few minutes of work and two days of waiting in a queue. How to connect the ticketing system (ITSM) to AWX or Ansible Automation Platform so that a repetitive request fulfils itself.