4.6 Use automation wisely

Materials: Low
Energy: Low
Water: Low
Emissions: Low

Automate recurring tasks only where this saves resources, such as scaling services to reduce consumption or handling suspicious activity.

Automate tasks: Human-testable
Automate recurring tasks, such as deployment, testing, and compilation in alignment with continuous integration and continuous delivery best practices.
Qualify tasks: Human-testable
Run automated tasks only when necessary to reduce unnecessary resource utilisation.
Automated scaling: Human-testable
Use automated scaling to promptly adjust server capacity up or down based on demand, ensuring efficient resource allocation. Implement buffering and throttling to manage load and maintain performance without overprovisioning.
Suspicious activity filtering: Machine-testable
Restrict the activity of unwanted and unnecessary third-party crawlers, suspicious user agents, unwanted users, bots, and scrapers from accessing or downloading your content. Follow best practices, such as server access rules and security tools, while ensuring your content remains accessible to users, search engines and any helpful, welcome crawlers. Consider that scrapers may be used to inform and train large language models.

Economic
Maximizing the number of tasks carried out rapidly by machine not only minimizes power use and carbon emissions, but also brings down maintenance and infrastructure costs.
Environment
Optimizing workflows can reduce the amount of energy used during peak periods where it may be most costly or unsustainable to run.
Operations
Automating repetitive tasks allows humans to focus on valuable, novel, and creative tasks that can offer greater job satisfaction and expand skills.
Security
Evading unwanted bots, crawlers, and similar users protects websites from harm and avoids potential downtime.