Migrating a Dockerized GitLab Chat bot to ARM Graviton2 in an afternoon

Hey folks, I haven’t written a blog post since before the covid pandemic started and I wanted to share some stuff I’ve been working on. As many of you know I’ve been singing the praises of Docker and containerised tooling since 2013 and Docker continues to bring me joy daily. In this post I’ll be sharing some real world examples and advice around containerising Chat bots, the pros/cons of bots and then we’ll wrap up with an example of how we can leverage Docker buildx to move our bots from AWS x86 based EC2 instances to ARM based Graviton 2 instances in an afternoon.

What is a Chat bot?

A Chat bot is a piece of code which lives within a communication tool such as Slack and enables the user to interact with other tools through prebuilt integrations or API calls. For example a simple Chat bot may welcome new members to a team or remind folks that it’s time for standup. More complex bots may engage the user in a riveting AI driven conversation about the benefits of NFTs and Bitcoin mining. For the purpose of this blog I’ll be focussing on GitLab ChatOps which are well documented here.

Chat bots when implemented with care, can empower the end user with super hero like powers. When poorly implemented they can become a distraction offering very little real world…