🚧 Automation Boundaries Link to heading
Summary: Automation helped us move faster, reduce errors, and scale operations.
But it didn’t solve everything — especially when our systems had to interact with others.
Where the Boundaries Appeared Link to heading
- Active Directory and DNS: We didn’t own it. Scripted group changes or DNS edits weren’t possible without external coordination.
- Firewall Rules and Load Balancers: Managed by a different team. Automation stopped at the request ticket.
- PKI and Certificates: We had to live with manually created and expired certs. That limited internal HTTPS and trust chain management.
- Compliance Tools and Approval Chains: Even when the script was ready, we had to wait on approvals or formal sign-offs.
What We Did Anyway Link to heading
- Built automation wrappers that generated tickets, change docs, and sign-off requests automatically
- Created SLA-based interface agreements to define boundaries and workflows clearly
- Set up dashboards and alerts to expose where human intervention was slowing things down
- Focused automation inward where we had control — and worked to minimize friction at the boundaries
What We Learned Link to heading
Your automation is only as fast as your slowest dependency.
So automate what you can — and structure what you can’t.
Automation isn’t about doing everything automatically.
It’s about making everything repeatable, traceable, and hand-off ready.
In upcoming posts, I’ll show how we built automation that respected boundaries — and even helped shift some of them.
Get in touch
Email me: starttalking@sh-soft.de