Implement SlackOps with CTO.ai Commands

CTO.ai Commands are the entrypoint to interacting with cloud-native automation workflows built on our platform and coordinating integrations with other systems. Commands allow you to communicate with your cloud infrastructure and the services you use to build and deploy your applications.

Because our goal is to make it easier for you to build a development workflow that meets your needs, you can trigger Commands runs via our ops CLI—or via our Slack integration.

What is a Command?

Each Command acts as a containerized wrapper for our SDK and runs on our platform. The SDK simplifies the process of building control points that your developers can use to interact with any system via the command line or Slack. Generally speaking, a Command comprises a Dockerfile, an ops.yml configuration file, and your code—which drives the behavior of the workflow.

Through our SDK, you can build Commands that interactively receive input from the user, manage application secrets, read and write configuration settings, handle logging, and process workflow events. Commands let you implement ChatOps workflows in your organizations without needing to manage additional infrastructure or APIs.

Using Commands

CTO.ai Commands are a core component of our Developer Control Plane, abstracting away much of the runtime configuration that would otherwise be required each time an application is deployed using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tooling. You can build a workflow using CTO.ai Commands that accomplish a broad range of tasks:

• Trigger interactive deployments from Slack to avoid manual errors and provide team-wide visibility into the deployment process.
• Make provisioning a new testing environment a self-serve process, from the comfort of Slack or the command line.
• Allow developers to resize existing environments on all cloud providers used by your organization—without requiring every developer to learn the nuances of each provider.
• Empower support staff to interact with your systems and resolve common problems, giving your engineering team more time to focus on building new features and product improvements.
• Generate lightweight analytics reports that surface insights to stakeholders directly in Slack.

Commands Dashboard

From the CTO.ai Dashboard, you can view the list of Commands workflows associated with your Team under the Commands tab. Clicking on any of the Commands on the Dashboard will allow you to view the details of a specific workflow, including:

• Current version of the Command
• Total number of times it has run
• Date and time of the last run
• Version history of the workflow
• Recent runs of this Command

Command Runs

Whenever a Command is run, a new Command Run is created and assigned a new UUID to uniquely identify it. A Command Run is the context for each execution of the Command, recording several key pieces of information about the run:

• Version of the Command that was run
• User who triggered the Command
• Time the Command was run
• Output logged from the Command