AWS Chatbot: ChatOps for AWS
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.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).
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.
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.
Useful, but only a small piece of a ChatOps picture.
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.
ChatOps is about providing visibility into operations.
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
You can also add a TOTP code to the command to get 2FA if you're really worried about limiting the attack vector - I actually gave a conference talk about that years ago.
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.
yay for delegating prod infrastructure access controls to Slack
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.