This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by TerraformMonkey
If you’re leading a DevOps or platform team, chances are you’ve seen this cycle before:
- Tickets piling up for infra changes
- Manual reviews dragging down delivery speed
- Engineers stuck firefighting misconfigs instead of building
That’s engineering toil—work that’s manual, repetitive, and adds little long-term value. And in cloud infrastructure, it’s everywhere.
🚨 The Cost of Toil
Engineering toil might feel small in isolation (“just fix this drift,” “just patch that config”), but it compounds:
- Slow delivery → Infra requests bottleneck in tickets
- Burnout → Engineers spend more time debugging than innovating
- Higher risk → Manual changes mean more room for error
- Innovation drag → Time that should go to features gets lost to maintenance
As Google SRE principles put it: too much toil kills scalability.
🛠️ How IaC Automation Reduces Toil
The cure isn’t “work harder”—it’s automate the repeatable stuff. With Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines and guardrails in place, teams can:
- Catch misconfigs early with automated policy checks in CI/CD
- Stop chasing drift with continuous drift detection & remediation
- Eliminate tickets by enabling self-service infra delivery
- Retire legacy pain through Terraform import of unmanaged resources
- Ban ClickOps chaos by surfacing console-created changes instantly
# Example: IaC automation pipeline snippet
workflow "terraform-ci" {
step "lint" {
runs = ["terraform fmt", "terraform validate"]
}
step "plan" {
runs = ["terraform plan -out=tfplan"]
}
step "apply" {
runs = ["terraform apply tfplan"]
}
}
Every change flows through the same automated process → safer, faster, less toil.
🚀 The Payoff
Teams that prioritize reducing engineering toil see benefits across the board:
- Reduced manual work → No more boilerplate Terraform or ticket loops
- Faster infra delivery → Devs get self-service, compliant infra on demand
- Less firefighting → Issues are caught early, before they hit production
- Happier engineers → Time is spent building, not cleaning up
If you want to go deeper, here’s a good read on signs of engineering toil and how to break the cycle with automation.
đź’¬ Wrapping Up
Engineering toil is a tax on innovation. The longer you ignore it, the more it grows.
The solution isn’t throwing more people at the problem—it’s building systems that make toil disappear for good.
💬 How does your team deal with infra toil today—scripts, tickets, or full IaC automation? Drop your thoughts below 👇
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by TerraformMonkey
TerraformMonkey | Sciencx (2025-09-05T08:35:00+00:00) 🔧 Ending Engineering Toil in DevOps: Why Automation Matters. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/05/%f0%9f%94%a7-ending-engineering-toil-in-devops-why-automation-matters/
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