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What chatops is and what it does
ChatOps is a type of chatbot that lets developers, managers, and ops people to automate tasks in the system. It allows you to automate a lot of your process without the need for code. For example, you can set up a task to ‘restarting’ our server. If you’re familiar with Jenkins or Change Logs, you can use this automation to restart a MySQL service.
It also allows easy deployment of updates to the system, and it makes life a lot easier for our developers. They can now deploy new code on the fly if they want to make updates that may affect the entire server or certain parts of the system. Just reporting back is not enough, there are specific scenarios where we might want to deploy code like that. And chatops makes it easy to do that.
ChatOps also provides great audit logs and logs of things like what server you deployed to which parts of the system. It even has a ‘logbot’ tool that helps convert logs into text such as JSON, so you can stuff them in the right format. [Editor’s note: this can be used even outside of chatbots platform – see below :]
We have a few other tools like Jenkins and Docker, but they’re just on the back end. So you could have someone update the router on Jenkins, but that wouldn’t do anything if it’s not connected to the system. That would make it just a command line tool, and without chatting with the person on the other side of the world.
How chatops helps manage devops
The main benefit of chatops is the fast logistics. Chat ops can help manage the entire team with one screen, thus there is no need to print out or copy and paste commands all over. With bot, you can forget worries about having to remember everything and have a fast collaboration. For example, with a single command, you can ‘restart our server’. Even if the developers are not at the office, they can still give an instruction and let their bot do the rest. Another benefit of chatops is that it also helps prevent mistakes because you don’t need to use your fingers for typing, so no more typos. You can eliminate them completely.
Also, the collaboration of chatops is really simple, so you don’t need to find a better tool to integrate it with Slack – Slack can do everything.
The above is an example of chatops on a project management app called Pivotal Tracker (source: theycallmeswift.com). Collaboration is achieved with this app where you can log activity on a project, view the history of changes in projects and get notifications at specific times or when specific conditions are met. With this app, you can easily track your project and collaborate with the entire team to get anything done. For example: when someone is nearby, they can just send a message to your bot and it will send a message all over Slack to everyone.
The benefits of using chatops to manage devops
Managing devops via chat is more efficient than using email. ChatOps can help with the speed in time critical situation, where you can have issues on your production environment and need your team to fix it quickly. The application allows you to hold conversations and share vital information with all relevant members of your team immediately. Also, you can easily keep track of the changes in the system. If you want to make sure that everything is running smoothly, you can command it to notify a specific member(s) when something goes wrong. Therefore, no task will be overlooked, so your devops is managed efficiently and effectively.
ChatOps, like other tools, requires some effort and discipline from you and your team, but it improves efficiency greatly. ChatOps is also useful in situations where you may have multiple services going down due to a bug in one of them. If you can pinpoint the affected services as soon as possible, you can fix the bug faster than relying on email alerts. This means that ChatOps is more effective when used concurrently with other tools, since it will help your team focus on specific tasks.
Benefits of using ChatOps
The challenges of using chatops to manage devops
Chatops is a tool that can become very confusing for people of a certain level, not only for new employees, but in general. ChatOps brings up several advantages and many issues. The difficulty comes from the complex commands used in chatops and the inability to use many common tools (like Dropbox), which at times have made it difficult for others to understand what the developers are trying to do. They then realized that if they were to use chatops, they should do it properly by understanding all the concepts first.
Chatops is a relatively new tool. It was conceived by GitHub, who used it widely in their company. But a number of other companies have adopted it as well, and more recently, it has become a trend. The advantages of chatops are very big as well:
1-Lower Cost: Chatops is an easy and inexpensive tool that can substitute expensive third party tools or remote servers. More than that, it is easy to manage and do not require hiring more people to run the operations of this software.
2-Easy to understand: It is easy for the programmers to define conversations as commands and execute them. In other words, it’s easy for the developers to mix their programming skills with their team interactions.
How to get started with chatops for managing devops
If you would like to start using chatops for managing devops, you must first decide how much time and effort you want to spend on it. The application is better for a large company, where the virtual environment is difficult to control and the number of employees using the system is much higher. Some people even say that it is impossible to use with small teams, but this depends on how skillful you are, so if you are willing to manage devops via chat, give it a try and see if it fits your needs.
About Devops
Devops is a new approach to managing software projects. The main idea behind Devops is the principle of pair programming. This is a practice, which requires developers to work in close collaboration with other developers by completing different tasks at the same time, in order to meet internal deadlines. It sounds like a good idea (at least more rational than the traditional development process), but it has some flaws, which is why people often feel that it’s not suitable for them. The main problems with the new approach are that it is not a good fit for many teams, working on different projects and having unique needs.
In addition to the standard functions of team collaboration, Devops technology offers other features. For example, it allows to use Agile methodologies even in the second stage of project development. There is also a possibility to perform continuous integration and management proactive (continuous) and predictive testing. The idea is that you don’t need to wait for a release to start development work. The only thing you need to do is to take a snapshot of the system at any stage in the development process and fix problems found during testing.
How to get started with chatops for managing devops?
