Reflecting on Automation I Wish I’d Started Sooner

As I reflect on my journey, I often find myself wondering, "Why didn’t I automate this sooner?" I’m sure many of you can relate to this. Whether you’re automating a manual task you’ve been doing for years, fully automating something you’ve only partially tackled before, or implementing a solution that transforms your workflow, these "aha" moments can be game-changers

For me, the turning point came when I faced a monumental challenge: managing a fleet of over 200 Kubernetes clusters spread across all three major cloud providers. As our infrastructure grew, so did the complexity, and I was hit with some tough questions:

• How do we roll out changes gradually without risking the stability of the entire system?
• How do I ensure deployments remain consistent so that engineers are working in familiar environments no matter where they’re debugging?
• How do we manage services across multiple platforms seamlessly, ensuring they stay in sync despite the underlying complexity?
• How do we provision on-demand environments based on user input, and do it quickly?

These weren’t just minor headaches—they were serious obstacles that slowed us down and introduced risk. I realized we couldn’t continue with manual processes, and partial automation wasn’t cutting it anymore.

That’s when I decided to build Ctrlplane, an open-source orchestration tool designed to solve these exact problems. Ctrlplane helps us manage, automate, and deploy changes at scale, providing the flexibility we need to adapt to the growing demands of our infrastructure. It’s become the backbone of our deployment strategy, enabling us to:

1. Roll out updates gradually across our entire fleet of clusters, giving us the control to catch issues early without impacting the whole system.
2. Ensure consistency in our deployments, so every environment is as familiar as the next, which streamlines troubleshooting and debugging.
3. Orchestrate services across multiple platforms, unifying our operations despite the complexity of running across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
4. Provision on-demand environments based on user input with incredible speed, allowing us to be responsive to internal and external requests.

These changes have fundamentally transformed how we operate, and I wish I had implemented them sooner.

I want to hear from you. What were your automation breakthroughs? Have you had moments where automating a task saved time, improved efficiency, or even changed how you work? Let’s share our stories and inspire each other to find the next opportunity for automation.