I would be pretty close to the exact target for this product. The killer feature that would put it over the edge for me would be the possible "crashcart" KVM feature mentioned later in the notes.
Lugging around a full KVM console is overkill (unless it is literally on a cart and you only need it at one location). And USB crash cart adapters are buggy, overpriced, and unmaintained.
With serial, SSH, and KVM this will fill the perfect "there is a piece of hardware on the rack I need to interface with" role.
I don't want to say you are wrong, because there are a lot of situations (most?) where deployment automation can greatly reduce errors.
However, there can also be a number of reasons why builds and deployments could not be automated safely:
- "Production" is not a single environment, but multiple customer environments with multiple deployment version targets based on need/contract. Customer environments might not even be accessible from same network as build/deploy machines.
- Code is for industrial/embedded/non-networked equipment.
- Policies dictated by own company or regulatory body require builds are manually checked and deployed by a human who can validate and sign off.
There really is no way of knowing. Automation can save hundreds and thousands of man-hours and reduce margin of error; but it is not applicable to every scenario. Sometimes manual work reinforced by good habits and processes are the tool for the job. As much as it pains be to say, as my job is automation.
Please note, DSDontWriteNetworkStores only prevents finder from writing metadata files to network filesystems, as the configuration key name suggests. It does not prevent it from writing metadata on your local filesystems, you will either need to use something like DeathToDSStore (requires disabling SIP), or remove them regularly post-creation.
Lugging around a full KVM console is overkill (unless it is literally on a cart and you only need it at one location). And USB crash cart adapters are buggy, overpriced, and unmaintained.
With serial, SSH, and KVM this will fill the perfect "there is a piece of hardware on the rack I need to interface with" role.