What is on Your Mind?

Please, I beg you, “Stop!” Yes, stop writing scripts and instead build workflows.
Programmers, Sys-Admins, System Support, I'm talking to you.

Ok, I know in this community I'm going to get some serious backlash for my statements but I truly believe in my statement.

There was a time when writing scripts to help support IT infrastructures and changing business processes was the best option. That time is gone. Todays computing systems are rapidly growing in complexity and the need for easier integration and better automation to manage these systems is becoming paramount.

“So where do we go from scripts”?, you ask. “That is the right question”, making reference back to the movie “iRobot”.

I believe the answer is workflow and workflow automation. I don't think this is the right forum to share all the reasons for my answer so let me take another approach and talk about why script fail.

If you are an IT professional, you most certainly have written a script or two in your time. Scripts are written to automate tasks with the general objective to be more productive and reduce errors. In the early stages of an organization or while its environment is small, writing a few scripts seems to add benefit and meet its objectives. However, over time the environment changes, grows and becomes more complex. This results in more tasks, which in turn requires the need to write more scripts. Soon, the ability to manage these scripts themselves becomes overwhelming - welcome to script hell.

AND...

To put it briefly scripts:

1) Have little or no security
2) Lack of reuse
3) Not cross-platform
4) Hard to maintain

I can't say I entirely agree with this. We have a directory full of python scripts (~ 15 MB) and they are magnificently modularised (and documented). Well written and highly reusable.

Could you please elaborate on this. (May be give an example, if possible)

Moved to a more suitable forum...

Will depend of the quality of the writing...and the person's knowledge and experience
For a company's point of vue, you get what you pay for... A truly experienced UNIX sysadmin script will not look the same as the one writen by a "highly qualified" IT consultant that left IT college 3 years ago with a 6 month shell class ...

Balajesuri,

Certainly, there are individuals, groups, and organizations - like you - that will work hard to write good clean reusable scripts. And if you are primarily a Python shop then it makes that easier. Most of the time, when I tell people, "Stop Writing Scripts" it's to stop writing shell scripts. There is always a place for higher-level language scripting like Python.

To comment about workflow and workflow automation. I've spent a good part of my career designing and writing automation systems. And that's my primary focus today. I would recommend reading my blog post.

Workflows allow you to work at a higher abstraction layer. It let's a user focus on what they really need to accomplish by providing a great deal of the heavy lifting. It removes the need to understand things like: how can I run this on 10 computers, what if I need elevated privs, should I be logging for auditing purposes. Maybe a visual will help:

Over the top. You are making many assumptions and of course you are making several incorrect statements. With that said, nothing wrong with putting together your own "world"... as long as it works and is well supported. So if you believe a python workflows (or whatever) is the "right answer", certainly you are free to do that. If you believe a workflow paradigm is the way the world should be crafted (even if not python based)... again, you are free to do that. There are many ways to solve problems. So I have no problem with a workflow paradigm.... but solutions should be able to implement whatever style best fits the situation.

I will never tell someone to stop writing scripts. Python, shell or otherwise.

Btw, it's a valid argument to say that Python is a lower level language than (Bourne) shell script. Just saying.

If I am going to have to write something that requires the complexity of a work flow, I am not going to write a script. I am going to write something that is an executable to take make it efficient in terms of computing resources. The complexity of the scripts you suggest are generally written with a work flow built in or some sort of logic beyond the requirment of a script. Take for example, the Nagios tool. It is a collection of scripts and it has an underlying work flow. I am not a fan of scripts that are complex, even with work flows.