Automate intelligent cloud operations with Slack and AWS

All right. How's everyone doing day two of rain event? We're feeling good. Yeah. All right. Well, I got a good one in here for you guys today. We're gonna be talking about AWS. We're gonna be talking about automation Slack. Obviously, let me introduce myself. My name is Chris. I'm a partner engineer at Slack. I work with our integration partners on creating best in class experiences for the thousands of apps that we have on our app directory today.

It's my great pleasure to give you a small taste of the new automation features that we have available in Slack and highlight how every one of you can automate some processes in AWS with some of our integrations. A small preamble. Please do not make any purchasing decisions based off of what you're about to see. And thank you for being here. Let's get started.

So we live in a world where you may encounter many hurdles to achieving productivity. For one, we're dealing with a very large number of services in an enterprise. Let's do an exercise. I want you to raise your hand if you use the service that I'm about to mention on a daily basis. So, Jira or Asana Money.com? All right. And keep your hand up if you use GitHub BitBucket Glab. All right. Chime Zoom. Google Meets Huddles Slack. Are your arms getting tired? I think you get the point.

So, there are many distinct services that we interact with on a day to day basis. Right. We do a task here. We do a task there. You're going to what, like 5, 10, 20 different places to get your work done and sometimes they get very distracting, right? Especially for those small repetitive tasks, all those little tasks take away from our focus time and ultimately, it affects our productivity. And yet now more than ever, we live in a day and age where we gotta be on top of our game, we're releasing software faster than ever. We're releasing at a greater volume than ever. And our customers expect that from us as well.

I'm sure many of you attendance can relate to this. And so it's hard, right? It's hard for developers, it's hard for dev ops operations account executives. It's hard to stay focused and to keep moving at the pace that we'd like to. And so all this to say we can't keep working the same way we have in the past, we have to adopt new strategies and adopt new technologies so that we could keep pace with the rate of change.

And so ultimately, I think there are four things that are essential to achieving operational excellence. First being able to effectively cross collaborate with other teams. Needless to say building software is a team effort. We work with developers, product managers, dev ops operations security. There are a lot of stakeholders involved and we need to keep those adequate channels so that everybody knows what's going on and we can have that collaboration take place.

Second being able to deliver work with transparency and visibility. So all the stakeholders I've just mentioned, we need to keep them updated with all the latest developments.

Third being able to deliver with speed. Just as I mentioned earlier, we're releasing at greater speed and a greater volume than ever before. And we need to keep that up and finally using the integrations and automations that we have at our hand to help us save time and be more productive. I really, that's what Slack is all about.

It is very much at the center of where a lot of work happens nowadays and it has grown beyond just being a communications platform. It's a place where you can find automations with the recent release of Workflow Builder. It's a place where you could find a ton of knowledge, right? Every day, we write thousands of words inside our Slack messages, canvases lists. You can almost think of it as an encyclopedia of all the things going on inside your company. And so with the help of AI powered search, we wanna give our users the ability to find value from all of that data. Much like Google search has given everybody the value of finding value from the internet.

Mhm and finally, Slack is a place where you collaborate by means a video with Huddles by means of sharing files and connecting with people outside of your organization using Slack Connect. One of our biggest areas of growth in recent years has been the sheer number of integrations that we have on our marketplace. We have over 2600 partner apps on our app directory, including native integrations with all of the Salesforce products.

Mhm and so the results of our commitment are shown right here in these numbers Slack has enabled more developers operators and it professionals to be more effective than ever before. It allows for faster development, shorter downtime and an increase in developer productivity. This could be attributed to the investments that we've made in creating features and tools that enable our users to do their best work.

And so we've been hard at work on continuing that trend on investing in tools to increase productivity. This past summer, we've launched new automation features such as Workflow Builder. Workflow Builder is a no-code automation platform that allows anyone whether they have technical knowledge or not to create workflows that allow them to automate their day to day tasks.

Building a workflow is simple, you simply drag and drop actions from your favorite app, drop them into your workflow and then you can launch them instantly. You could build anything from simple workflows that collect information in a form or you could build something more complex which will manage incident responses for example.

And so as I've mentioned previously, Slack has a huge library of integrated apps. Over the years, many users come to Slack to interact with other third party services. In fact, we have apps that cover every stage of the software development life cycle from planning to operations. These apps help you regain time by reducing the amount of contact switching that you have to do. You can create tickets with the Jira app. You can comment on for request using the GitHub app. You start code deployments using the Jenkins app. All this to say you don't have to leave Slack to do some of your work.

And so you may have noticed that AWS comes up a few times across this slide. That's no coincidence because we integrate with over 200 AWS services. Perfect number, right? AWS is a place where a lot of your software operations occur from hosting to pipelines to deployments. Our goal is to bridge the gap between those operations that occur in AWS and the collaboration that occurs in Slack.

And so here's just a small number of the services that are available through Slack just like earlier. You have coverage across multiple stages of the software life cycle from development to operations to administration and security. I'm sure very many of you in the audience use some of these services. Maybe you use them through the AWS CLI or the AWS console or you may have a custom integration.

Well, I want to show you how you could do some of these tasks without ever leaving Slack in partnership with Slack Amazon has built the AWS Chapa app. The app is essentially an engagement layer or UI for the 200 plus services. It works bidirectionally, meaning it will send you notifications inside a Slack, but it will also allow users to perform action on those AWS services by means of buttons, workflows or commands.

The chatbot is a free no code integration. All you need to do is install it on your Slack workspace and have an AWS account to get started. Let's take a look at some of the key functionalities that are available and some of the use cases that we see our customers using all the time.

Observability is very key to understanding how your systems are performing. The AWS Chatbot allows you to collect metrics logs and traces on your various AWS services. The results of the query are then posted in the Slack channel so that you and your team members can collaborate immediately. This is very useful for detecting problems, early troubleshooting deficiencies and understanding the overall health of your system.

Observable also extends to CI and CD pipelines. The AWS Chatbot pushes notifications to Slack. They give you real time status of your deployments and if anything fails or passes, you'll know it instantly. As I've mentioned before, our goal is to reduce the amount of context switching so that our users can focus on what to do next.

You what to do next? What if an incident occurs? What if your user experience is slow? How do you know what is going on? How do you know what's at fault? Well, we've all faced these questions at some point. With the AWS Chatbot, you'll be able to receive alarms, view dashboards and logs for events occurring in real time. You can spin up incident tickets, perform escalations and run automa workbooks, sorry. What's great is that you can set up alerts and notifications for multiple AWS services across multiple accounts and for multiple regions, all with a single application being the AWS Chatbot.

Ok. In addition to observability, the chatbot also allows you to take action, you can invoke AWS CLI commands, step functions and lambda functions directly from the Slack user interface. You could do things such as execute a script, revert a deployment or even stop an EC2 instance pretty powerful, right?

Finally, last but not least, I'm sure there are very many AWS admins out there in the world that really appreciate this feature. The chat bot allows you to receive budget alerts so that you know, exactly when you're approaching or have surpassed your threshold, you could detect spending anomalies and manage your operational costs through Slack.

You can get started with the AWS Chatbot today free of charge by finding it in the Slack app directory or by going on the QR code on screen. What I've shown you here is just a very, very small taste of this possible with the AWS Chap off for Slack. This integration as well as the thousands of others that we have on our app directory is why Slack is proud to the year intelligent automation platform.

And with that, it's all I have for you today. I'm.