Automation

Automation is what happens when a task is too dull, too error-prone, or too frequent to keep doing by hand.

In this site, the word covers a few different shapes: Ansible playbooks, Azure Logic Apps, shell scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and small tools that glue APIs together. The implementation changes. The reason is usually the same: make the work repeatable and leave a trail someone else can inspect.

Bad automation just hides a mess behind a button. Good automation is boring in the best way. It says what it is going to do, does it the same way each time, and fails loudly enough that a person can fix it.