That’s it! The title says it all—it’s my north star when it comes to DevOps, infrastructure, and automation.

Sure, tools, team skills, and project longevity matter when building a sustainable environment. But at the end of the day, what I’m really chasing is the easiest processes I can fully automate.

And that’s where things get tricky.

Take rollbacks, for example. Rolling back sounds simple—you just redeploy an older release SHA. But is that really “fully automated”?

Or think about continuous integration that takes 30 minutes to push code to production. That’s fine for a new release, maybe—but does it make rollbacks fast and reliable? Not really. When you’re in the middle of an outage, you need to get back to a trusted version as quickly as possible. Waiting half an hour for tests, linting, and formatting is time you can’t afford.

Then there’s communication—arguably the most overlooked part of automation. Good automation doesn’t just run; it talks. You shouldn’t have to babysit logs to know what’s happening. Your system should proactively guide your attention to where it matters most. That’s how trust in automation is built.

It doesn’t matter if you’re managing 4,000 EC2 instances or three containers. Building a solid process requires the same understanding of the problem space. Sure, three containers let you move faster—but the principles are identical.

Communication, speed, and rollback are just three examples of the tiny details most people skip when designing automation. In my opinion, it’s these details that separate a “working system” from something production-ready.