News

AWS Offers Chatbot for DevOps

• By David Ramel
• 07/25/2019

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has entered the world of ChatOps with its first chatbot targeting the DevOps space, a beta offering appropriately called AWS Chatbot.

"AWS Chatbot is a new service that makes it easy to set up ChatOps for AWS in your Amazon Chime or Slack chat rooms," AWS said in a July 24 announcement. "AWS Chatbot provides an interactive agent that enables you to monitor and interact with your AWS resources from team chat rooms. You can receive alerts and execute commands to return diagnostic information so your team can collaborate and respond to events faster. AWS Chatbot is in beta with support for receiving notifications in your chat room."

And what is ChatOps? According to Chatbots Magazine, "ChatOps is the use of chat clients, chatbots and real-time communication tools to facilitate how software development and operation tasks are communicated and executed. In a ChatOps environment, the chat client serves as the primary communication channel for ongoing work."

The beta service can currently receive notification from these AWS services:

• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Health
• AWS Budgets
• AWS Security Hub
• Amazon GuardDuty
• AWS CloudFormation

With AWS handling the integration details, the company claims it only takes a few minutes to configure the service.

A July 24 blog post by AWS's Ilya Bezdelev shows exactly how that is done in a five-step process, explaining that the chatbot uses Simple Notification Service (SNS).

"DevOps teams widely use chat rooms as communications hubs where team members interact -- both with one another and with the systems that they operate," Bezdelev said. "Bots help facilitate these interactions, delivering important notifications and relaying commands from users back to systems. Many teams even prefer that operational events and notifications come through chat rooms where the entire team can see the notifications and discuss next steps."

The company is already touting integration of its services with the chatbot, yesterday announcing AWS Budgets works with the new service. "Starting today, you can leverage AWS Budgets' integration with the newly released AWS Chatbot service to receive AWS Budgets alerts via Slack and Amazon Chime," AWS said.