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Automating Tasks Made Easy

To properly automate tasks, we need a way to make them execute automatically at the proper times. A task that needs to be started manually is not really fully automated.

However, in order to be able to leave them running in the background while worrying about more pressing issues, the task will need to be adequate to run in fire-and-forget mode. We should be able to monitor that it executes correctly, be sure that we capture relevant information (such as receiving notifications if something interesting arises), and know whether there have been any errors while running it.

Ensuring that a piece of software runs consistently with high reliability is actually a very big deal. It is one area that, in order to be done properly, requires specialized knowledge and staff, who typically go by the names of sysadmin, operations, or SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). Big operations, such as Amazon and Google, require huge investment in ensuring that everything works 24/7.

The objective for this book is way more modest than that, as most software doesn't require this kind of high availability. Designing systems with downtimes of less than a few seconds per year is challenging, but executing a task with reasonable reliability is a much easier thing to do. However, be aware that there's maintenance to be done, and plan accordingly.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

• Preparing a task
• Setting up a cron job
• Capturing errors and problems
• Sending email notifications

We'll begin by going over how we ought to prepare a task before we automate it.