I'm not seeing anything here that makes me think they had any kind of automation at all! In my experience, if they had automation things would have consistently failed on all servers the deployment was executed on.

That said, if you're going to fly the jet liner in full manual mode, you better make sure your co-pilot is watching the instruments.

The parent post may be pointing out that the point of this software is to automate trading on the stock market. It's risky if your software testing, rollout, monitoring and rollback process is not sufficiently automated. This second kind of automation is the kind that you or I are most likely more familiar with. And was lacking.