AWS Chatbot: ChatOps for AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/introducing-aws-chatbot-chatops-for-aws/

by gjmveloso • 7 years ago

44 16 7 years ago

aws.amazon.com

davnicwil2• 7 years ago

Ah this is extremely cool - having set up slackops by building bots on lambdas in the past, I can attest it's way more difficult and time consuming than it should be.

For an example of an unexpected issue you face - slackbots must give responses within 3000ms otherwise slack reports the slash command as failed. This means you have to do things like set up a proxy and worker lambda for anything that doesn't execute essentially instantaneously, and even then it sometimes fails to respond within 3000ms on cold starts.

A purpose built interface you can just get set up with a few clicks would be a great improvement. Hope the other cloud providers introduce similar services as well.

davnicwil2• 7 years ago

As an edit to the above, as pointed out in other comments, this actually only does unidirectional notifications - i.e. pushing notifications to Slack. This is the part that is already really trivial, with Slack webhooks.

I suppose this hooks into stuff like SNS and may not require writing code or running a server/lambda, but still, less useful than it first appeared. A service for easily setting up backends for conversational slackbots or slash commands would be much more exciting, in my opinion.

mooreds3• 7 years ago

Tl;dr: Add alerts to your slack channel (or chime, if you use that) from AWS services by essentially adding another target to an SNS topic.

List of supported services: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/chatbot/latest/adminguide/relate...

Only a few services supported right now (is in beta) but the big one (cloudwatch alarms) is.

sneak• 7 years ago

ChatOps is bidirectional. This appears, at first glance, to simply be an alerting channel that can deliver to Slack.

Useful, but only a small piece of a ChatOps picture.

mooreds3• 7 years ago

Do you mean being able to act on, say, a cloudwatch alert? What does that look like?

jdenning3• 7 years ago

It depends on the alert :D

More seriously though:

I had a ChatOps setup a few years back where authorized users could send commands to the config management/remote execution system we used to manage all our servers (in this instance, SaltStack).

Junior staff and people who were more on the "Dev" side DevOps were able to watch the full incident process from Alert -> Investigation -> Remediation both in real-time, and by reviewing the logs.

In the same way, people were able to learn commands to create and destroy infrastructure, which was useful for their workflow and improved efficiency all around.

It takes a fair bit of work to get setup properly, but it's pretty great once you do.

jdenning3• 7 years ago

Came here to say the same thing -- the real value in ChatOps comes when Ops folks are issuing commands in the chat room; this enables other employees to watch and learn how specific issues are investigated and resolved.

ChatOps is about providing visibility into operations.

somepig2• 7 years ago

the real value in ChatOps comes when Ops folks are issuing commands in the chat room

yeah, being able to let Slack act as your identity management for manipulating prod is a killer app. much like sticking a pistol in your mouth

mediascreen• 7 years ago

I've been waiting for something like this. But now that it's here it seems a bit complicated to automate the setup if you have lots of accounts.

I'll probably just go with an API Gateway proxy for the SNS webhooks in one account and add the webhook setup for the other accounts to their Cloudformation templates.

t34543• 7 years ago

I’m not a fan of ChatOps, call me old fashioned but I like tickets to track my work.

mooreds3• 7 years ago

Not affiliated, but this company built a slack to ticketing system bridge.

https://halp.com

Maybe best of both worlds?

That said, at small companies where I have worked I have found slack/chatops to be very useful. It's already there. You don't need a separate system. Hopefully you have some other work organization tool (Trello, etc) that you can use to track work (slack is great for real-time discussion and history but I'd hate to have it be my to-do list).

dlphn___xyz• 7 years ago

when will this chatbot fad die out?

smt88• 7 years ago

This is a notification bot. It's not a conversational interface.

somepig2• 7 years ago

not before a massive security incident or two.

yay for delegating prod infrastructure access controls to Slack

bifrost• 7 years ago

Sortof unimpressed since PagerDuty already has pretty good Slack/Chat integration.

AWS Chatbot: ChatOps for AWS

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