Automation Is a Double-Edged Sword
Ansible playbooks, Terraform plans and Python scripts have transformed how infrastructure teams work: a change that once took a day now takes minutes. But that leverage cuts both ways. An automation that can configure a hundred devices correctly can also misconfigure them just as fast, and undocumented automation is a special kind of risk, powerful, invisible, and understood by only one person.
The Governance Gap
Most teams invest heavily in writing automation and almost nothing in tracking it. The result is a sprawl of scripts in various repos, of unknown scope, last tested at some forgotten point, with no clear owner. For a tech lead or IT manager, that's an operational and audit blind spot: you can't assess the risk of something you haven't catalogued.
Bringing Order to It
Treating automation as a managed asset, not a side project, is the shift that matters:
- Maintain a register of what each automation does, which tool it uses, and its scope and target environment.
- Record an owner and a last-tested date, since untested automation against production is a risk, not a convenience.
- Track status (draft, testing, active, deprecated) so retired scripts don't linger and fire unexpectedly.
- Note the failure-handling behaviour so on-call staff know what a failed run actually does.
The attached template, 07: Automation Runbook / Playbook Tracker, is a register of your scripts and playbooks with purpose, tool, environment, scope, owner, tested/last-run dates, status and failure handling. Catalogue what you run so automation stays an asset rather than a hidden liability.