Comparison
Operational readiness reviewvsToil automation
Operational readiness review
before it can take real traffic, someone checks it has alerts, a runbook, a rollback, an owner and a restore that has been tested.
A structured check that a service is genuinely operable before it goes live: ownership, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, dependency limits, rollback and recovery. It is the mechanism that stops the gap between working code and a supportable service being discovered during the first incident. Its value depends on being a short list of things that have actually caused incidents here, rather than a long generic form.
Full entry →Toil automation
the twenty-minute manual thing you did every Tuesday for a year became a controller that does it without telling you.
Removing repetitive manual operational work by encoding it, whether as a script, a controller or a self-service action. The economics are the point: work that scales with the size of the fleet consumes the team's capacity for improvement, which is what makes it worth automating even when each instance is small. The precondition is that the manual procedure is written down and consistent, which is why the runbook usually comes first.
Full entry →