There’s a famous saying in tech (often attributed to Bill Gates):
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
In DevOps, that kind of “laziness” isn’t about avoiding work—it’s about avoiding repetitive work. When you feel that internal groan after doing the same task for the third time, that’s your automation instinct kicking in. Good automation starts with a simple question: why am I doing this manually at all?
A solid rule of thumb is this: if you have to do something more than once, it’s worth asking whether it can be automated.
Manual steps are slow, error-prone, and don’t scale. Automation, on the other hand, is fast, repeatable, and boring in the best possible way. Once a task is scripted or placed into a pipeline, it runs the same way every time—no missed steps, no “it worked on my machine,” and no late-night hotfixes because someone forgot a checkbox.
In my own experience, tools like Azure DevOps make this mindset incredibly practical. Pipelines, repos, and infrastructure automation are all within easy reach, which lowers the barrier to automating everything. That said, Azure DevOps isn’t the answer to every problem. Depending on the environment and constraints, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Terraform, or Ansible might be a better fit. The key is to trust your “lazy” DevOps engineers—they’ll naturally gravitate toward the tools that remove the most friction and manual effort. In the end, being “lazy” in DevOps really means being thoughtful: investing a little time upfront to automate today so you never have to do the same boring thing again tomorrow.
– Author: Raymond Barreto
