That depends a lot on your application. In the (simple) case of BB, I could autoupdate the servers, because they’re redundant so it doesn’t matter if they come back up or not.
But in a serious installation if I autoupdate the application servers and some aspect of the update bricks the application, I’m probably out of a job. you need to QA infrastructure changes and do a staged rollout, which means little is automated.
This skillset, BTW, is one of the hardest things to learn unless someone hands you the keys to a really big network (or a network where downtime literally costs $$$ per second). I’ve hired and trained a LOT of sysadmins, and getting them to change their thinking from “small” to “big” was always the hardest part.
One of the reasons I love maintaining the BB infrastructure is that even though I get to do enterprise-y things like redundant shared storage and config management, it’s a tiny, simple setup and redundant enough that if stuff breaks, no one notices and I can fix it at my leisure. That’s a serious departure from the day-job version where something being down usually means we’re a single subsystem away from losing thousands of dollars a minute…
