If we go by the notion that Slack is the best place to connect people, teams, tools, and virtual machines, then it might be wise to start implementing some developer tools into Slack, and DevOps-oriented apps are a great place to start.
This post aims to outline some of the popular Slack integrations that many teams use. The basis of these recommendations come from what we’ve observed other teams use widely in their stack. The importance of these tools in Slack has only become an indispensable part of teams, especially as they go remote. So without any further ado, here they are:
Effective project management is essential to any skilled engineering team and Jira Cloud is an excellent tool for such matters.
Teams can create project-wide notifications, especially for hotfixes or urgent issues. We’ve seen other teams also use this integration to search for specific issues in Slack channels and have trails of how issues have progressed with time.
The Slack slash commands make it easy to create tickets on the fly too, so your team can interfaces with Jira’s web platform a lot less than needed — saving time and energy to be used where it matters.
2. PagerDuty
Ahhh, doesn’t every DevOps person love to deal with incidents?
PagerDuty’s Slack integration is a superb tool booster charge your incident response management as it allows, for example, for teams to escalate, re-assign, and contextualize incidents with relevant information.
The power of such a tool is that it allows all this to be done in real-time and in a remote setting that Slack naturally provides. So, in the end, results in your response team is the ability to respond faster to when your users encounter issues.
Another great feature for responders is the capability to assign incidents to relevant Slack channels and war rooms. With these features, you’d be able to precisely target your end-users with the relevant responders to the issue(s) at hand.
Ultimately, this integration is an example of how ChatOps in Slack can quickly bolster team capabilities.
3. CircleCI
CircleCI has been revolutionizing for many teams that look to move to a cloud-based CI system. This tool’s use has been exponentially increasing in recent years and it comes to no surprise.
CircleCI’s primary Slack-based use cases lie in build and deploy notifications. Because CircleCI helps automate so many deployments as teams scale, having a notification system in Slack with your main CI/CD tool is a quick, easy, and cheap way to quickly level up your ability to respond to deployment failures.
The Slack integration not only allows you to trace failures, but also see the triggered commits for that build, and who on the team pushed the code GitHub or Bitbucket.
There are other CI/CD Slack integrations that are out there such as GitLab, Jenkins, Heroku, and AWS ChatOps. Although their adoption rates appear less widespread than CircleCI. And that’s why we currently recommend CircleCI over anything else for Slack.
4. Customized Slack App
If you’re wanting to build your own solution and not deal with vendor lock-in, then this is an option worth considering.
Let’s face it, some solutions out there just don’t cut it for your team, and taking matters to your own hands becomes a serious option if you are scaled enough and well equipped to do so. It would certainly enable you to create custom workflows and integrated tooling.
The only caution here is the opportunity cost of building a custom apps: namely time. Building a custom Slack app isn’t the end of the world and it’s certainly not a difficult task. But it is, nonetheless, extremely time-consuming for developers.
5. CTO.ai
This might seem to you as a generic shameless plug. But given the context of point #4, we felt it would be fair to include CTO.ai as a DevOps solution in Slack.
Here’s why: CTO.ai is a serverless framework to enable teams to quickly and easily create your own ChatOps commands in Slack or the command line.
Essentially teams benefit from the ability to create their own custom solution using the CTO.ai SDK (currently supporting Python, Golang, Node.js, and Bash) which is easy to learn and also have a serverless solution, which is the benefit of vendor-based solutions.
The CTO.ai set-up also benefits from the ability to build and automate the entire builds and deployment process for multiple products and development teams at your company.
So in essence, it has all the benefits of a custom solution and the serverless advantages that SaaS solutions bring.
Conclusion
Slack is an amazing communication platform and every team should consider it as a platform to enable DevOps.
Above are the five tools that we’ve observed other teams use to bolster their team’s productivity. In the end, the world is your oyster and you’re able to do whatever you’d like in Slack, so we hope this article helped provide you with some ideas for your own team.
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