Simplifying DevOps with SlackBots

The ultimate goal of development and operations engineering is to build fully self-healing production systems. In reality, this is difficult to achieve for a variety of reasons and engineers often have to step in to fix broken processes. Simultaneously, there has been an explosion of content delivery and information management tools to deal with, necessitating potentially many touch-points in order to debug a single failure. This talk will focus on how Slackbots can be used to develop standalone application ecosystems to reduce the complexity of engaging with these different information management tools, and help make devops and engineering teams more effective. I will walk through the implementation of a Slackbot in Scala using Argonaut and Play Framework to monitor a machine learning platform. I will also demonstrate how Slackbots can give teams the ability to monitor and manage their work from mobile devices, enabling them to build very rich sets of features, more easily get real time notifications, updates of system processes, execute commands and re-run jobs on the go. In our experience, we have seen that having Slackbots has helped create a culture that enables developers to work flexibly and collaborate more efficiently thereby improving team morale.