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Simplify and Automate

Now that the workload has reduced a bit over the last month or so we can spend time doing project work. It's always been my philosophy to simplify as much as possible, this is normally because I end up having to fix messes, which are normally caused by undue complexity. Complexity can affect performance, availability, and manageability. Automation can often create complexity, as can requests by various people in the business who don't necessarily plan the projects or requests they make of others (especially development and operations).

This being said I often get blocked when I try to simplify things, because people want to build things out in a more redundant manner than is required for the business needs. There are a lot of ways to create a redundant system without creating complexity, you just have to step back and look at the overall configuration and requirements to come up with the best solution.

We get a lot of requests from our QA team to reload various Resin app servers, and other processes. What we are doing now is creating a web based interface for them to do the reloads on their own. This eliminates the need for operations to run the scripts, and saves time and resources.

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