Infracoders Graz Meetup: Bots are taking my job, so I started rollin' my own

The revival of the Infracoders Graz Meetup group took place on the 21st of February 2017 at the Aula X Space in Eggenberg, Graz. About 30 Infracoders listened to Jürgen Brüder's talk about: "Bots are taking my job, so I started rollin' my own."

Welcome

Theresa Wallas, who is working at Infralovers, welcomed the numerous guests and told them about the future plans of the Infracoders. Henceforth every 6-8 weeks Meetups about technologies like Chef, Puppet, Docker, Jenkins, etc. should take place to exchange about infrastructure automatisation. All Infracoders are invited to held speeches about this topics.

Talk: "Bots are taking my job, so I started rollin' my own"

Jürgen Brüder, experienced IT-consultant and entrepreneur works at Infralovers, who deliver IT-consulting with focus on IT-infrastructure, cloud and automatisation, since 12 years now. After he had introduced himself he told how Edmund Haselwanter, CEO at Infralovers and he integrated ChatOps at a fortune 500 company.

First of all he defined terms like deployment so that all Infracoders understand what he is talking about. Afterwards he told the attendees about the starting situation and the required objectives of their customers. It was easy to reach the goals with the implementation of ChatOps because with them deployments can solely be made with Chats. But what is ChatOps? - Jürgen explained it like this:

• Chatops is 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

In addition to that he gave a summary of ChatOps tools like Slack, HipChat and Mattermost and pointed out behavioural rules. Finally, he established a connection to ChatBots and told about the solution which was delivered to the customer by Infralovers. They integrated ChatOps and developed own Bots with whom the employees could interact directly. These Bots are hosted on a Lita Bot framework and were expanded with own plugins. They listen to the Ruby programming language and can be reached by Slack. Marvin and Bender, the Bots, can trigger deployments with Jenkins, whereby one of them is responsible for staging and the other one for the production to reach a higher extend of security. After this exciting talk Jürgen shows in a live demo how the Bots work and how the deployment with Slack is possible.

Discussion & Networking

At the end Edmund und Jürgen answered questions like:

• What are your Jenkins-Jobs alike?
• Where do you save the authorization for the bots?
• How can customers be convinced to move to the cloud?

The remaining time was used to network by drinks and snacks sponsored by Infralovers.