Chatops Deluxe

Matt S Trout — 45 minutes

mst got annoyed about IRC/slack bots and how terrible the various frameworks were in terms of easy extensibility and robustness. The end result is a bot whose plugins can be in any language, running on multiple systems, designed to be easy to deploy - I'll explain how I did it, and how you can use it.

I don't know about the rest of you, but almost every sysadmin I know has at
one point written an IRC bot or at least grumbled about the existing ones
and thought about it.

These days, in the brave new world of slack and hipchat and mattermost and
CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD writing bots has been rebranded as 'chatops' - and
since I was looking at setting up some systems bots, I investigated the
current state of the art.

Apparently unified authentication and authorisation isn't web scale.

So I stopped, stepped back, and asked: in 2019, what do I actually want out
of a bot?

* Easy and unified configuration
* Language agnostic for plugins
* That includes being able to write commands as shell scripts
* Authentication and authorisation as a core concept
* Uptime-maximising multi process architecture
* Uniform access to whichever chat system you're using

So I built something that provides all of those, and in this talk I'll
introduce you to the end result, the architecture, and most importantly,
how to go as quickly as possible from zero to a deployment that's actually
useful for day to day sysadmin and operations work.