SlackOps Leverages DevOps Best Practices to Help Your Organization at All Levels
Introducing SlackOps, a Slack-first approach to managing and automating DevOps workflows. Discover practical use cases and benefits of adopting SlackOps.
What is SlackOps, And How Is It Disrupting Traditional DevOps Workflows?
Slack is a real-time communication and collaboration platform that is used by companies of all shapes and sizes. Slack as a platform is highly customizable, with an accessible and powerful API that enables companies to build tools for automation and management. DevOps teams noticed how valuable Slack was internally and decided to extend it to customer support. Thus, SlackOps was born.
SlackOps is an umbrella term that simply describes the use of Slack to communicate with customers. Since Slack is so extendable, this can mean something as simple as having a shared channel for IT support questions, or it could be something as complex as automated monitoring, management, and even proactive support of an IT environment.
Contrary to popular belief, SlackOps is not a direct descendent of DevOps, nor does a company have to practice DevOps to take advantage of it. SlackOps does utilize a lot of the concepts and practices of a DevOps environment. This includes many “work smarter, not harder” ideas such as process automation, high speed communications, and actions that can be taken (or reverted) with the click of a button. Like DevOps, SlackOps makes it easy to have teams collaborate seamlessly, regardless of geographic distance or organizational setup. And like DevOps, SlackOps is flexible enough to be an all-in-one-tool deployment so that companies can manage the process, access controls, and workflow, all from one central location.
Note: It’s important to note that while SlackOps got its name from the Slack platform, it can be utilized on other communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams. The implementation might be different on the back-end, but the value delivered by SlackOps will be the same.
Regardless of the platform being used, SlackOps can be automated to some extent. The tasks and operations that can be automated will depend on the specific needs of the organization and the tools and processes that are in place.
SlackOps Use Cases
Here are some common examples of potential SlackOps use cases:
- Allowing direct communications from customer to engineering support
- Automating the responses to frequently asked questions
- Interfacing with an ITSM to create, track, and close support tickets
- Monitor and report on the health and performance of IT infrastructure
- Running scripts to perform proactive maintenance or updates
Note that these are only a few of the things that service providers can do with SlackOps. We will dive deeper into SlackOps (and how Forma Cloud uses SlackOps) to discuss more advanced use cases in future postings.
SlackOps for Service Providers
From a service provider’s perspective, SlackOps simplifies a lot of tasks. While it is unquestionably difficult to set up and maintain a SlackOps deployment, this complexity is entirely on the service provider’s side. Slack, as we have discussed, is very popular, meaning that users will have an easier time interacting with whatever services and bots are made available. Making use of the best-practices of DevOps will make SlackOps a more streamlined process. Providers will have total control over their deployment and can extend it using any number of widely available programming languages and can use already existing DevOps methodologies to deploy and update their SlackOps environments.
SlackOps for Customers
What the customer sees is a simple Slack channel (or set of channels). This is likely something they are already very familiar with, and a robust SlackOps deployment will mean that customers don’t have to do anything else. No more emails, no more phone calls, no more tickets dropped into queues via a web form. Customers will simply see status updates automatically (or ask for them and get an immediate response) in the channel.
The simplicity of this belies the complexity behind it: While the customer only interacts with the slack channel, the actions, processes, and automations that are powered by, and reported on in, the slack channel can be nearly unlimited.
Here’s one quick example: Imagine a tool that monitors your AWS environment for cost-management purposes, notifies you of unexpected infrastructure changes that might cause budget overruns, and offers you the ability to unmake those infrastructure changes, all from a Slack channel.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Benefits of Adopting SlackOps
One of the biggest advantages of SlackOps is the speed that it can provide to any number of IT processes- regardless of whether it is being used by a DevOps team or not. AI Bots on web pages are far more complex as they have to work via HTTP/S, a setup that is cumbersome and may not work reliably. Slack is a more modern platform that is built for collaboration and synchronous work already, meaning that SlackOps bots have a huge leg up. This is a major advantage as effective problem-solving requires speed.
It is important to note that all the things that SlackOps can do can be done using other tools. The trouble with using too many tools is dashboard creep: Say for example a company does monitoring through Company A, and ticket management through Company C. If they also have Slack for their own communication, that adds up to three tools they need to maintain. One of SlackOps’ biggest strengths is that it does all of these things on one familiar platform- everything runs on Slack. In this example, there would be no need for Company A or B. This 2/3rd reduction of a customer’s tool stack would likely be enough to convince a lot of companies to switch even without taking the rest of SlackOps strengths into account.
Forma Cloud can help you save on cloud costs. Our expert team of AWS engineers and cost management specialists monitor your spending so you can understand and reduce it. We operate via a fast and efficient SlackOps model so we can provide fast and reliable answers to questions about the cost of your AWS environment. Visit us online to learn more or schedule a demo to see our cost management tools in action.
