Imagine a typical day at work that starts with checking Google Calendar to prepare for where you need to be and when. With engaging discussions, your teams create Google Docs to take notes on the important decisions coming out of the meetings and begin writing briefs to kick off your company’s next big project. Then you turn to Sheets to track the KPIs and leverage Slides to prepare the final presentation for your executive leadership by 4pm that day.

As we’ve previously written, old-fashioned employee time tracking methods such as paper timecards or Excel come with several downsides. First, the payroll process is time consuming and error prone, as you have to manually tally hours and overtime. Second, you don’t know if your employees are in fact on the job when they’re punching in, rather than a coworker (and those extra minutes or hours that employees report working can lead to a significant waste of money).

In the daily life of a Site Reliability Engineer, the main goal is to reduce all the work we call toil. But what is toil? Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as a service grows. This blog post describes our journey to automate our nodes rotation process when we have a new AMI release and the open source tools we built on this.