Bots are taking my job, so I started rollin my own

Infracoders Meetup GRAZ
21. February 2017

Infracoders
• Infrastructure Automation
• Technologies: Chef, Puppet, Docker, Jenkins etc.
• Exchange of ideas
• Tips & tricks
• Networking
Leitnergasse 16, 8010 Graz | www.infralovers.com

Plan for the future
• Revive Infracoders Meetups
• Every 6 weeks
• Cooperation
• Give a speech
• Contact: linkedin.com/in/theresa-wallas
twallas@infralovers.com

Agenda
• 19:00-20:00 Talk, Questions & Answers
• 20:00-21:00 Networking
• Drinks are sponsored by Infralovers
• Additional drinks at the bar

Bots are taking my job,
so I started rollin’ my own…

About me
• Jürgen Brüder (@jaybrueder)
• Senior IT-Consultant at Infralovers
• Trainer at Commandemy
• Before that, I did Start-Ups
• Barcamp-Graz Orga

Infralovers
• IT-Consultancy for over 13 years
• CEO is Edmund Haselwanter
• Customers include Telekom Austria, Sony NetServices,
SAP, GE Capital to mention a few
• Our focus: IT-Infrastructure, Cloud and Automation

• We also love to teach
• Our courses include topics like OpenStack, AWS, Jenkins,
Ruby, Chef, BDD, Kubernetes, Docker etc.
• Tech that we actually use as Consultants
• http://commandemy.com

Agenda
• The problem we needed to solve
• ChatBots and ChatOps
• How we solved the problem
• Live-Demo
• Q&A

Moving to the cloud
• For two years we accompanied a customer on his move to
the cloud (Amazon Web Services)
• Speed up deployments
• Create an automated deployment pipeline
• Reducing manual labour and human error

What is a Deployment?
“The process of uploading a new version of software to a server”

Communication is key
• 5 enterprise applications moved so far
• Each having it’s own remote developer team…
• in 4 different countries (AT, DE, FIN, UK)
• All managed by a couple of people in Austrian HQ

We did interviews
• Where are the pain points?
• What can we help improve?
• What works? What does not?
• How do employees feel about moving to the cloud?

Answers
• We want as little operations as possible
• We want to know what is going on all the time
• Developers rely heavily on other people to deploy
• Management does not appreciate what we do
• More tools are good, but can we trust our employees?

Goals
• We wanted to give people the power to deploy as often as
they needed to
• No access to deployment tools, except chat
• Visibility and common history
• Increase management appreciation

ChatOps
• A collaboration model that connects people, tools,
processes, and automation into a transparent workflow
• It’s all about conversation
• It’s basically your whole company happening inside a chat
tool

You already use it with your friends
• Sending SMS or WhatsApp messages instead of calling
• Discussing important news inside Facebook comments
• You probably chat with your co-workers through Skype
• Are you still using E-Mails?

ChatOps in the enterprise
• Using a chat tool is pretty common in the enterprise
(Skype, Jabber)
• Employees chatting with each other is normal
• But does your IT infrastructure also chat with you?
• Can you chat with your IT infrastructure?

What do we see?
• Channels for each project
• Direct reference of co-worker
• External systems posting channel relevant messages
(Trello, Mailchimp)
• Interaction with Trello post

Interacting with IT is changing
• Human to human interaction is driven by communication
• Human to machine interaction used to be driven by buttons
• With ChatOps, we can also communicate with machines and
tools
• But not all tools are ChatOps ready yet…

http://nordicapis.com/12-frameworks-to-build-chatops-bots/

Things to remember
• Never share confidential data through a ChatOps tool
• Mattermost is self-hosted, other tools are not
• External tools often integrate with Slack/Mattermost out-
of-the-box

It’s not all sunshine and flowers
• Info diet
• Wiki / Documentation becomes “look into the chat history”
• Danger of being always “on”
• Ding, ding, ding – Notification hell

I recommend this GitHub repo
• https://github.com/buritica/collaboration-guides
• Guidelines for Effective Collaboration
• Has a lot of great info about when to message, who to
message and when a phone call is a better idea

What is a ChatBot?
• Software that can respond to your text messages
• Should “mimic” conversation with people using artificial
intelligence
• Can take action according to your wishes
• “Claire, book me a flight to San Francisco tomorrow”

Why should you care?
• StartUp Buzzword of the year
• Will play a role in IT-Automation
• Do you like terminal windows? You’ll love bots!
• Consumer vs. Business
• Integrate a bot into your ChatOps tool

What we implemented
• ChatOps was a big part of solving our customers problem
• We created our own bot that joins the conversation
• The bot is able to interact with the deployment pipeline
• Employees are able to interact with the bot
• They are not able to interact with the deployment pipeline
directly

Rollin our own…
• Our own bot is running on the Lita bot framework
• Extended by writing custom plugins
• Using the Ruby programming language
• Listens in on Slack (like a user)
• Triggers deployments with Jenkins
• Actually, we implemented two bots!

Why Lita?
• We really like Ruby
• At the time a very advanced bot framework
• Great Slack integration
• Plugins are like Ruby Gems
• Easiest to customize for us Rubyists
• We also use other Ruby tools in the deployment pipeline

Did you say two bots?
• We have one bot for each “environment”
• One for staging
• One for production
• Reason: Security
• We called them “Marvin” and “Bender”

Bot Security
• Marvin is only allowed to deploy to staging
• All developers can communicate with Marvin
• Bender does “the heavy lifting” in production
• Only selected users can trigger production deployments
• We can grant and revoke deployments rights on a per user
basis

The Bot and Jenkins
• The bot runs on the same instance as Jenkins does
• No cross-network triggering of jobs
• Jenkins dashboard is only accessible via SSH tunnel
• Jenkins gives job info to the bot, the bot posts it in Slack
• The bot is like a proxy.
• Ability to add more tools later (e.g. GitLab, GitHub)

What other magic do we use?
• Amazon EC2 & Elastic Beanstalk (depends on app)
• Amazon CloudFormation for orchestration
• Amazon Lambda for serverless code execution
• Chef for Configuration Management
• Artifactory for artifact storage
• Datadog for monitoring
• GitLab for source control management
• Jenkins for continuous deployment
• There a also tools for a ”per app” basis (e.g. RunScope)

Lessons learned
• Empowering for the developers
• Removed unnecessary human interaction in deployments
• There is still QA going on (staging vs production)
• Management sees work happening
• Common place for information

What the future holds
• Two-Factor Auth with Smartwatch (https://duo.com/)
• Amazon Alexa
• Google Assistant
• Apple Siri
• Using a more advanced bot as basis (Cog)

You want to learn more?
We offer courses on
• ChatOps and custom bots
• Amazon Web Services
• Jenkins
• Chef
• Automated Workflows
• http://commandemy.com

We are hiring!
team@infralovers.com

Time for Q&A!
jbrueder@infralovers.com

Where can we find the demo code?
https://github.com/infralovers/chatops-demo-cookbook
https://github.com/infralovers/chatops-demo-lita-plugin

References
https://github.com/operable/cog
https://github.com/github/hubot
https://www.lita.io/
https://github.com/errbotio/errbot
https://github.com/buritica/collaboration-guides

Bots are taking my job, so I started rollin my own

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