This talk was presented at Failover Conf on April 21, 2020.

Within DevOps, automation has become a North Star. We want to automate the toil away, but the goal of "no toil" is unattainable. Many runbooks can only be partially automated because they still require human intervention and insights. Human-in-the-Loop DevOps is the idea that we can benefit from automating toil while still embracing the human interaction in specific tasks.

In this talk, we'll discuss the spectrum of automation in DevOps, common patterns of tasks that can be automated away, like CI/CD and monitoring, and ones that can be partially automated with Human-in-the-Loop DevOps, like incident response. We'll share examples of interfaces that pull humans into the loop at critical junctures and allow humans to add maximal value while automating the tedium. Lastly, we'll discuss how Human-in-the-Loop DevOps can improve the on-call experience and improve efficiency.