Have you built internal CLI tools for your team? Has it payed off?

Good question!

I manage a few on premise servers, running docker containers, with ansible. I have some app version-specifc playbooks that I run when necessary (eg. a version that requires changes on the server) and a playbook.sh script to run such playbooks (that provides some default values, logging etc).

I've been thinking about adding a cli that would make it easier to prompt the user for values, and execute certain work flows depending on the values. I'm not sure if it's worth the effort though, and wonder if it's something that's easier done with ansible.

I wonder what other people have done in similar situations.

I've done this for two of my previous teams. One team was appreciative and it saved us some time for elevation prep work.

I built something else that was also for elevation prep work for my second team. It saved some time and boredom by automating some reports running for 15-20 projects. They didn't care. That group was very concerned with status, conformity, and prestige as far as how you got rated. So for people like me, nothing was ever good enough.