I’ve long been fascinated by the power of automation, but even more fascinated with being lazy AND utilizing heavy automation. A few years ago, I watched a presentation from Jesse Newland at Github about their chatops system, and how Hubot takes care of ancillary tasks and increases decision-making collaboration. I haven’t had a chance until recently to truly dive into an environment and think about how to automate it on a large scale – just the usual combination of puppet and home made scripts to take care of repetitive tasks.
That changed last week.
Our parent company set up a Slack instance for us, and I decided I would try to pipe notifications from AutoPkgr into it to notify me when there are software updates we need to package up and deploy to our employees. That prompted me to think about what other things I could do from the comfort of my iPhone app…
This is the start of an occasional series documenting how I subvert things to notify and process various tasks based on Slack’s API and my love of bash, python, and PHP. My goals with this project are:
- centralize alerting functions away from emails in order to reclaim my inbox a bit
- spend more time thinking about improving infrastructure rather than babysitting it
- make the system “munki aware,” and script / automate regular maintenance tasks
- make the system “logging aware” by tying into our centralized logging repository
- look really cool while doing my job (this is the future, after all)
I’m working on this idea relatively in that order. Check out the chatops category for resources, updates, and walk-throughs.