The latest articles on DEV Community by Robert Alexander (@ralexanderphi). https://dev.to/ralexanderphi https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F249062%2F9b9c00a2-417e-458a-accc-9d59f71861b7.jpeg https://dev.to/ralexanderphi en Robert Alexander Wed, 25 Dec 2019 16:33:09 +0000 https://dev.to/ralexanderphi/a-mobile-alternative-to-chatops-3km3 https://dev.to/ralexanderphi/a-mobile-alternative-to-chatops-3km3 <p>At my last job we considered implementing ChatOps in our Slack to make deploying, and managing our service lightweight but we ran into some concerns that stalled the effort.</p> <p>ChatOps promises to let you perform operations from your mobile devices, making Ops task quick and easy to perform even on the go.</p> <p>In this post I discuss an idea that gains some of the benefits, while avoiding some of the challenges of ChatOps.</p> <h2> Security of Slack ChatOps </h2> <p>Your chat system isn't a strong security boundary. A ChatOps bot will need to implement security including whitelisting users who can perform actions and determine which actions each user can perform.</p> <p>This is redundant as these users probably also have IAM credentials with groups or roles for managing their access, meaning you now have two different authorization systems to manage.</p> <h2> Overhead of Setting up ChatOps </h2> <p>We created AWS Lambda functions so engineers could manage the service from the AWS command line by just invoking a function. Adding ChatOps that re-used these functions would be another layer, which depending on how we chose to implement it could be time consuming and distract from core development efforts.</p> <h2> An Alternative </h2> <p>What if engineers could invoke Lambda functions directly from an Android app using their existing IAM credentials?</p> <p><a href="https://github.com/ralexander-phi/android-aws-lambda-runner">AWS Lambda Invoker</a> is an open source Android App that does exactly that.</p> <p>The app comes with a mobile friendly, native JSON editor that aims to reduce the burden of writing JSON function inputs.</p> <p>Tweak your Lambda function to log invocations to Slack, and you have a similar audit trail to ChatOps with much lower setup overhead.</p> <p>The AWS Console app for Android doesn't support running Lambda functions, so this tool is also a general extension to the AWS experience on Android.</p> <p>Try it out:<br> <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexsci.android.lambdarunner">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexsci.android.lambdarunner</a></p> <p>Learn more here:<br> <a href="https://alexsci.com/android-apps/aws-lambda-invoker/getting-started.html">Getting Started</a></p>