Hearst Business Media Develops Killer Slack Bot Integration

by Johann R. Rodriguez

Meet Pauly Comtois.

Pauly Comtois, VP of DevOps, Hearst Business Media

He’s the VP of DevOps for Hearst Business Media, a global technology leader delivering information, insights, analytics, and workflow solutions to meet worldwide needs in the finance, healthcare and transportation needs. Johann Rodriguez, Senior Manager of Branding & Community, recently had a chance to speak with Pauly about a smart bot integration he built for Slack, the popular instant messaging platform for the workforce. Below is their conversation.

Johann: Pauly, can you tell us a little bit about the Slack bot integration you built?

Pauly: The bot integration we are building is unique in that it allows for any level of developer to customize and configure the framework. A developer can write directly to the REST based API to post and get data or you can talk directly to the bot within Slack. When you are interacting with the bot in Slack, you are using an extremely small footprint in Docker. This can be built on either on lightweight Docker containers or a “server-less” technology in the background. A command is issued to the bot, the framework starts up a new Docker container to perform the requested action and then the container is destroyed. All this happens in real time with no delay to the user. This means low backend costs to the organization, great customer experience and maximum flexibility.

Johann: Why bots?

Pauly: My team works with the Business Units within Hearst Business Media to support the journey of DevOps, Lean and Agile. Automation and collaboration are some of the main pillars of these transformations. We have already seen amazing results from creating a broad DevOps community across the HBM BU’s and we wanted to leverage that community to bring about automation. Slack allowed us to accomplish both automation and building community with one tool.

Johann: What compelled you to build this integration?

Pauly: We successfully deployed the bot to several BU’s, however in order to customize and configure the bot you had to use Node.JS and coffee script. Our BU’s are predominantly using Microsoft products and this barrier to entry was problematic. In order to provide the best automation experience and service possible, with the very low barriers to entry and value, we decided to create a new framework that would support many languages.

Johann: What are some use cases where your bot integration could make work easier and more efficient?

Pauly: We see the bot used in three main categories, although the bot can be used for virtually any automation.

1. Incident/Outage Management: Managing an outage in a SaaS platform can be chaotic. The bot automates much of the mundane tasks that must be done but often do not contribute to the direct resolution of the outage. Examples of automation tasks are notifying customers over a set time period, recording all actions taken for post mortem meetings, escalation of tickets and ticket management and updating status pages. The bot can automatically manage all of these moving pieces freeing up your most valuable assets, your knowledge workers, to solve the complex problems in front of them.

2. Continuous Integration: The bot is a great automation tool for tying together a CI tool chain. It is able to manage all the notifications, event recordings and orchestration. The bot can be used to design and auto-revert CI pipeline, where tests are coordinated on new software changes and reverted or rolled back before they enter the main code pipeline. All notifications can be displayed in the Slack developer channel and the CI tool chain can be managed through simple bot commands.

Continuous Delivery: Once the code has been fully tested and is ready to be deployed, it moves into another stage of the value stream. This portion of the pipeline is often filled with approval gates, scripts and applications to get the software into the production environment. It can manage the moving pieces as well as providing management and monitoring capabilities all from the Slack operations channel.

I would also argue that the bot adds some levity and fun to Slack. Having a little humor in the work place can help to diffuse tough situations and make the difficult tasks a little less onerous.

Johann: What other technologies do you feel have potential to disrupt the workforce?

Pauly: We are seeing a greater and greater push to move towards a server-less approach to architecture. There are still servers of course, and there will always be a need for engineers to manage data centers, but we are seeing the desire to move that skill out of the software companies. This consolidation will push the sentiment of “software is eating the world” forward at a much faster pace. I believe we will continue to see a movement towards everything as code. For this reason, it is important that organizations continue to work on their culture and processes around creating code.

Johann: Lastly, what do you do for fun when you’re not at work?

Pauly: I enjoy creating inventions with my son using Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards and programming. I am an relentless reader and I play the guitar and sing (poorly).

Now, let’s take a look at the Slack bot in action, courtesy of Aaron Blythe, from the Hearst Business Media Automation Team:

Special thanks to Pauly Comtois from Hearst Business Media for sharing more info on his Slack bot integration and providing more insight into his vision on where tech is going. Thanks as well to Aaron Blythe for sharing the Slack bot demo video.

You can follow all of us on twitter: Pauly Comtois, Johann Rodriguez, and Aaron Blythe.