Saving Your Time: 3 Strategies for Automating Tasks

“How I wish I were more productive!” How many times have you thought or said this? To a certain extent, day-to-day tasks consume a lot of our time — be it a simple task or even a complex one. Therefore, in this article, we will talk about 3 ways to automate tasks that, even without us noticing, consume much of our time.

Strategy 1: Event-Driven Automation

We cannot keep staring at alarm queues, waiting for something to happen before taking action, right? After all, we are talking about our time, and we should consider it sacred. That is why one of the ways to save it is to use our resources to generate an action without any human intervention. How?

Many companies have tools for monitoring their data centers, such as Zabbix, a very powerful Open Source tool. When an alarm (trigger) occurs, a task can be executed through an action within the tool itself. This eliminates the need for analyst monitoring or manual execution of the task.

For better performance and ease in developing these automations, there are powerful tools that can be used, such as Ansible, Rundeck, Jenkins, and Git. However, it is not our objective to delve deep into these tools in this article.

Strategy 2: Objective Automation

Another way to save our time is to use it to automate repetitive tasks that are often performed manually — for example, creating users across several servers in your data center. Let’s agree that doing this by hand is a true waste of time! Why not create a script that does this for you across all desired destinations? That is true time-saving.

Another objective automation is the Deploy of tools/applications in our environment and for our clients (CI/CD). We can use the tools mentioned in Strategy 1 for this same purpose, building/rebuilding containerized environments with ease and saving a lot of time.

Strategy 3: Periodic Automation

We all have, or have had, some “button” that needed to be pressed every day, or almost every day. Perhaps to perform a cleanup, a verification, or something related. This is also a true slaughterhouse of our precious time. How can we escape this “time thief”? By using tools, such as those mentioned previously, to centralize these same tasks and schedule them so that no one needs to execute them manually.

Something of note in this subtopic is Rundeck, already mentioned before. This tool can make our lives much easier. It helps organize tasks into groups and projects, allowing for practical scheduling. It also enables integration with other tools, such as Ansible and Git, also previously mentioned. But let’s leave the functionalities, pros, and cons for another topic.

Conclusion

How do all these strategies apply to us, Edgers? We strive our hardest to follow each of them, utilizing the best tools available on the market. We highly prioritize the best use of our time so that we do not lose it on unnecessary things. Every day, we think about how to redirect our efforts toward new projects and deployments instead of repetitive tasks. This has resulted in much more time available for complex activities, fewer human errors, and greater agility in deliveries. With all these Self-Healing and CI/CD solutions, we have greater system resilience, contributing significantly to availability and performance for our end client.