The Hidden Cost of Toil in DevOps
DevOps is all about efficiency, reliability, and automation. But within every DevOps team's workflow, there’s a hidden tax that drags down productivity and morale: toil. Toil refers to repetitive, manual work that doesn’t add long-term value but is necessary to keep systems running. If left unchecked, toil can lead to burnout, slower innovation, and unnecessary operational costs.
Reducing toil is a key focus for Caparra, and a big motivator for our work in building AI-powered tools focused on DevOps. In this post, we’ll explore why toil is a problem and, more importantly, how teams can reduce it to focus on high-value work.
DevOps shouldn't feel like toil. Empower your team with tools to prevent burnout.
What Is Toil?
The term "toil" was popularized by Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to describe work that is:
Manual – Requires human intervention rather than automation.
Repetitive – The same tasks are performed over and over.
Automatable – Could be eliminated through scripts, automation, or better tooling.
Interrupt-driven – Reacting to incidents instead of working on proactive improvements.
No long-term value – Once completed, the work doesn’t generate lasting benefits.
Google’s SRE Book provides a deep dive into toil and why reducing it is essential for scalable and resilient infrastructure.
Examples of toil in DevOps include manually provisioning infrastructure, responding to the same recurring incidents, managing configuration changes without automation, and handling repetitive CI/CD pipeline failures.
The Cost of Toil in DevOps
Toil isn't just an annoyance—it has real consequences for DevOps teams and organizations.
1. Burnout and Low Morale
When engineers spend too much time on repetitive, low-value tasks, they have less energy for problem-solving and innovation. This can lead to burnout, decreased job satisfaction, and higher turnover rates. The 2023 State of DevOps Report by Puppet highlights how excessive toil contributes to job dissatisfaction among DevOps professionals.
2. Slow Deployment and Incident Response
Manual processes slow down releases and make it harder to respond to incidents efficiently. If your team is bogged down by toil, deploying a new feature or fixing an issue can take much longer than necessary.
3. Reduced Innovation
High-performing DevOps teams should focus on improving systems, building new features, and optimizing performance. But when too much time is spent on repetitive tasks, there’s little room for innovation.
4. Increased Risk of Errors
Humans make mistakes, especially when performing repetitive tasks. Automating toil reduces the likelihood of misconfigurations, security gaps, and downtime caused by human error.
5. Higher Operational Costs
Time spent on toil is time not spent on strategic initiatives. This inefficiency translates into higher operational costs and slower time-to-market for new products or updates.
How to Reduce Toil in DevOps
Reducing toil requires a combination of automation, better tooling, and cultural shifts within your organization. Here’s how to start:
1. Automate Everything You Can
If a task is repetitive and predictable, it can likely be automated. Use tools like:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Automate provisioning and configuration management using tools like Terraform or Ansible.
CI/CD Pipelines – Automate code deployment, testing, and delivery with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. Check out our step-by-step recommendations for implementing continuous integration.
ChatOps – Use chat-based automation (e.g., Slack or Microsoft Teams bots) to trigger deployments or incident responses.
Incident Response Automation – Use AIOps tools to analyze logs, detect anomalies, and trigger automated remediation.
For a more detailed breakdown of automation best practices, check out Red Hat’s guide to IT automation.
2. Standardize and Simplify Processes
A lot of toil comes from complex, inconsistent workflows. Standardizing deployment processes, incident management, and change controls can help reduce unnecessary work.
For example, implementing a self-service model where developers can deploy code without involving DevOps engineers for every change can significantly reduce toil. Here’s our tips on how to empower your software developers with a shift-left mindset.
3. Shift Left with Monitoring and Observability
Instead of reacting to issues, focus on proactive monitoring and self-healing systems.
Use observability tools (e.g., Prometheus or Datadog) to detect and resolve issues before they escalate.
Implement auto-scaling and self-healing mechanisms to reduce manual intervention during high-traffic periods.
4. Invest in AI-Powered Automation
AI-powered DevOps tools can take automation to the next level. AI-driven solutions can:
Detect and resolve incidents automatically.
Optimize infrastructure usage based on real-time data.
Identify patterns in system failures and suggest preventive measures.
The Caparra team is focused on AI-powered tools that reduce the burden of toil by handling repetitive tasks, freeing up engineers to focus on higher-value work.
5. Encourage a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Reducing toil isn’t a one-time project—it’s an ongoing effort. Encourage DevOps teams to:
Regularly review workflows and identify areas of inefficiency.
Foster a blameless postmortem culture to learn from incidents and improve automation.
Allocate time for automation projects to gradually eliminate repetitive tasks.
Conclusion
Toil is a silent drain on DevOps teams, but it doesn’t have to be. By investing in automation, improving processes, and embracing AI-powered solutions, organizations can reduce toil, increase productivity, and improve developer happiness.
At Caparra, we’re dedicated to helping DevOps teams eliminate toil with AI-driven automation. Want to learn more? Try out our free Caparra chatbot to explore how AI can transform your DevOps workflows:
