With the continuous development of the Internet, more and more enterprises in the operation and maintenance management have realized the transformation from manual operation and maintenance to automated operation and maintenance, the following IT training to understand, the past of manual operation and maintenance have what stage.

One stage, the human workshop stage, that is, we encountered all the operation and maintenance problems, basically rely on manual operation to complete. In this case, the system is not large, the problems encountered are relatively simple, mostly focused on the hardware, network and system level, so people with some experience in operating system or network maintenance can handle it.

Operation and maintenance in this scenario, which is often referred to as SA, system administrator, and generally multi-tasking, the number of people is not too large.

The second stage, the scripting tool stage, generally the vast majority of enterprises will soon transition from the first stage to the second stage, because the previous stage of a large number of repetitive and cumbersome operations, can be completely converted into scripts to achieve, rather than every time to knock a bunch of similar commands.

Early SAs were primarily focused on various shells, so a lot of them would have been competitive if they could shell-write some batch scripts. Further down the line, dynamic languages such as Perl, Ruby, Python, and others that we all know are also widely used in the implementation of scripting tools, especially automation implementations with relatively complex logic and scenarios.

Three stages, process and tools stage, when we encapsulate some of the complexity of the operation into a single script, the efficiency will indeed improve a lot, but the business scenarios we face and the volume is also becoming more complex. For example, for the operation and maintenance students, before is responsible for installing and configuring the operating system, if it is dozens or hundreds of units of the scale, script batch execution can be completely taken care of.

But furthermore, O&M is also responsible for the frequent release of software, many times a week, or even every day, which is determined by the characteristics of the business, especially the Internet type of business, and the original traditional every month, or even a couple of months to release the scene requirements are completely different. And with the increase in the volume of users, the number of servers may have reached hundreds or thousands, and the deployment of the business is not the same, so simply rely on script execution, has been completely unable to meet the requirements.

This time, we have to face more complex scenarios to achieve, for example, to do a business deployment, operation and maintenance students may want to install servers, make system configuration changes, install software packages, start and stop the process, and then load balanced on the configuration of services and so on. At this point, there is a need for a process to link the functions of a script , but also some script execution results of the verification and judgment process.