SRE Automation Overview

Before you start: this course pulls together concepts from Incident Management, HA/DR, and Capacity Planning — reading those first (or at least Incident Management) makes the automation targets here concrete rather than abstract. Kubernetes fundamentals and basic Ansible/scripting familiarity help for the examples.

What Does Automation Mean for SREs?

SRE automation means eliminating toil — repetitive, manual, automatable work that scales linearly with service growth. If toil exceeds 50% of your time, the team drowns.

Types of SRE Automation

1. Runbook Automation

Convert incident runbooks into executable scripts that trigger automatically from alerts.

2. Auto-Remediation

# Kubernetes restarts OOMKilled pods automatically
# (OOMKilled = the container was killed for exceeding its memory limit)
spec:
  containers:
  - name: myapp
    resources:
      limits:
        memory: "512Mi"
  restartPolicy: Always

3. Capacity Auto-Scaling

apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
spec:
  minReplicas: 2
  maxReplicas: 20
  metrics:
  - type: Resource
    resource:
      name: cpu
      target:
        type: Utilization
        averageUtilization: 70

4. GitOps Deployment Automation

Developer pushes code → CI builds image → updates Helm values → ArgoCD detects and deploys. Zero manual kubectl apply in production.

5. Alert Correlation

Group 50 symptom alerts into 1 root-cause incident. Reduces alert fatigue and improves MTTR.

Measuring Automation Success

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Tools