IT Automation Playbook
A practitioner’s reference for the automation practices IT organizations have converged on as best practice — from CI/CD and infrastructure as code to incident response, security, and AI-assisted operations. Every practice explained with what it is, why it works, how to implement it, and how to know it’s working.
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Nine areas of practice
Each section builds on the last, and every page ends with an adoption checklist you can lift straight into a backlog.
Foundations
Deciding what deserves automating, building the business case, the maturity model, and the anti-patterns that waste budget.
CI/CD Pipelines
Pipeline design, test strategy, deployment patterns, and rollback that works because it was designed in rather than assumed.
Infrastructure as Code
Module design, state and drift, immutable infrastructure, and guardrails encoded as executable policy.
GitOps & Platform Engineering
Git as the control plane, progressive delivery, internal developer platforms, and golden paths that teams actually use.
Observability & Incident Response
Automatic instrumentation, alerting that respects on-call humans, executable runbooks, and safe self-healing.
Security & Compliance
Shift-left scanning, secrets without long-lived credentials, supply chain integrity, and audit evidence as a build artifact.
AI-Assisted Automation
Where language models genuinely help operations, the guardrails agents need, AIOps, and automated review.
Measurement & Governance
DORA metrics without the gaming, automated change management, cost automation, and scaling practice across teams.
Case Studies
Chaos engineering, error budgets, trunk-based development, and ephemeral environments — with what actually transfers.
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