Self-Service Infrastructure

Ticket-ops — a developer files a request, a platform engineer manually provisions it two days later — doesn't make infrastructure safer, it just makes it slower while creating a new failure mode: the manual step where a tired engineer clicks the wrong region or forgets a tag. Self-service done well replaces the slow human gate with a fast automated one that's actually more consistent than the human was.

The goal isn't zero approval, it's approval only where it earns its cost. A guardrail that blocks everything is not safer than no guardrail — it just pushes people back to manual workarounds that have no guardrail at all.

1. Default to auto-approve, escalate by blast radius