Introduction to ChatOps
We are probably listening to the word ChatOps more often—at every conference, at GitHub or around the water cooler. But what does it mean? And why and how would you implement it at your organization? What are its benefits?Our team of highly skilled and certified professionals help Enterprises to leverage DevOps capabilities by enabling solutions for Continuous Integration and Continuous Development, Automated provisioning and Cloud Native Transformation. Talk to our DevOps ExpertIn this blog, we cover how ChatOps is the Future of this Era; DevOps will be on next Level with use of ChatOps.We will Complete ChatOps from Scratch to Expert Level
What is ChatOps?
ChatOps is an association model that connects people, tools, processes, and automation into a transparent workflow. This drift connects the work that is needed, the work that is happening, and the work that used to be finished in a persistent area that is staffed by using people, bots, and related tools. By bringing your equipment into your conversations and the use of a chatbot that works with essential plugins and scripts, your group can automate duties and collaborate to work better, cheaper, and faster. While in a chat room, crew participants good commands that the chatbot is configured to run via customized scripts and plugins. The instructions can range from code deployments to protection event responses to crew member notifications. The entire group collaborates as instructions are run. GitHub pioneered ChatOps as a way to automate most operations-related tasks with a chatbot. Several ChatOps equipment are available, which include Slack and Hip-chat. ChatOps integrates improvement tools, operations tools, and approaches into a collaboration platform so that teams can correctly communicate and control the flow of their work. The solution maintains a timeline of group verbal exchange that gives a document and continues anybody up to date, averting facts overload.Why ChatOps?
Automation
Conversations can be designed to set off movements automatically. Instead of forcing every crew member to hold a repository of guide scripts, the code can be saved and computerized in a well-documented and centralized communication platform. The chat-bot can be configured to choose upon instructions in real-time, execute moves and replace the console to maintain every team member on the same page. The error-prone practice of guide code execution and progress tracking are replaced with high-quality automation capabilities of intelligent chatbots. As a result, customers store the time and hassle of executing repetitive manual operations tasks as they go toward collaborative and advantageous teamwork. Also, Read Best Automation Tools for DevOpsContextual Collaboration
Silos are created when group individuals fail to talk statistics in the right context. Considering the proliferation of tooling and complicated processes worried in software development and I.T. operations, it turns into a difficult task to extract and current, accurate context with each conversation. Instead of relying on multiple channels to obtain contextual notifications and manually connecting the dots to make feel of the available information, ChatOps introduces facts inside a continually reachable or up-to-date context. This approves customers to talk constructive, concrete and information-driven comments and actions between different customers except relying on assumptions.Workplace Transparency
Honest and visible verbal exchange is quintessential in incident administration situations. In disturbing cases, organizations struggle to prevent the blame-game amongst the personnel and inspire them to collaborate effectively. In situations when group members are open and truthful in their communications, even the right and straightforward statements such as "the code works on my machine" do no favour to develop an improvement project. ChatOps approves the conversations to align with the reality of venture situations. If a build or feature is strolling on one machine and now not on others, the default reaction of blaming different customers is replaced through collaborative efforts to identifying the issues that forestall steady consequences across all customers and machines. This practice is less complicated when the accomplice statistics are reachable by way of a centralized and common verbal exchange platform.Productivity
ChatOps helps collaboration between disbursed teams by using making contextual data on hand to all users in real-time. Without a common platform to visualize and talk about challenge progress, customers with restrained access to silo-ed tools and technology techniques may additionally now not be capable of communicating the vital information. Since ChatOps operates as automated surroundings to execute commands and set off actions, customers no longer have to matter on time-consuming guide scripts to function the same actions. The time financial savings translate into convenience and availability to spend efforts on extra meaningful job tasks instead.Employee Engagement
When all customers are on the same page, it becomes easier for anybody to contribute to the project and discussions. Information-driven collaboration removes the bottleneck and delays in getting admission to the proper records to function the fantastic actions. Users reap self-belief as the build-measure-learn-iterate method continues everybody knowledgeable related to viable issues for the duration of the improvement life-cycle or challenge progress. And for the reason that customers are relying on intelligent bots to visit correct information, the psychological barrier in inquiring for and reminding other crew contributors for excellent statistics is naturally removed. Ultimately, team participants can talk on extra necessary things such as devising techniques and making collective decisions, as a substitute for inquiring for data and speaking incomplete information. From a safety and compliance perspective, ChatOps affords the delivered benefit of documenting I.T. Ops duties and organizing a communication mechanism for proactive problem resolution. While chatbots and centralized communication platforms have existed for years to make sure these benefits to an extent, ChatOps promises the philosophy and lifestyle of information sharing that is designed to do away with the barriers between siloed Devs, Ops and I.T. Support environments.Also Read, What is The Role of Virtualization in DevOps? – A Simple Guide
Three crucial elements in ChatOps
Collaboration tool
It's the Chat Client the place stakeholders and teams are linked between them and to the structures they work on. There are some chat platforms :- Slack: the main chat platform for groups which collected extra than 4 million every day active users. It is also one of the first systems that built-in bots into its system.
- Hip-chat by Atlassian is a group chat, file sharing, video chat & display screen sharing constructed for teams & business.
Bot
T his is the core of ChatOps methodology. The Bot bridges the gap between collaboration tool and the Devops tools. The Bot receives requests from teams, then retrieves data from integrated structures via executing a set of instructions (scripts).- Hubot, a leading bot tool for ChatOps. It is a treasured open supply robotic (CoffeeScript) for automating chatrooms made returned in 2013 by way of Github. Hubot is beneficial and powerful by using Scripts. They define the competencies of your Hubot instance. Hundreds of them are written and maintained through the community. It is most cases helps to automate most of the ops-related tasks
- Lita is a framework for bots committed to agency chat rooms written in Ruby. It is heavily stimulated from Hubot. This framework can be used to build operational venture automation and has a very comprehensive listing of plugins which ability that it can be built-in to many chat platforms as Slack, Facebook Messenger and others.
- Cog, made with the aid of Operable, is every other chatbot framework to automate DevOps workflows. It's designed as a chat platform and is also language agnostic and makes use of a Unix-style pipeline to activate complicated functionality.
- ErrBot is a chatbot daemon that creates bots that are in the middle of a chat platform and DevOps tools. It is written in Python and goals to make integrating and tool that offers an API, effortlessly to a chat platform by using commands.
System integration
The third key thing in ChatOps. Simply put, it is the DevOps tools allowing extra productivity. Such as :- Issue tracking
- Version Control Systems
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Configuration Management tools (Provisioning)
- Continuous Integration Servers:
- Monitoring:
Conclusion
ChatOps's key to success is democratization. It is not a product. It is not something you can install. The human aspect of conversation-driven collaboration is at the core of ChatOps. If humans can proceed to find approaches to work together better, and if technological know-how can continue to improve those methods, the things humans can create and do are sincerely infinite and will solely preserve accelerating.
