Saltstack

Automation Bots can help IT operations teams day-to-day work, and enhance the interaction between customers and IT members in a standard, fast, and secure way. (Check the use cases from my previous posts, and new ones to come.) Just keep it simple! That’s the key to also enable easy adoption, a low learning curve, easy operability, and maintainability. Let’s talk about those concepts. Cheap: the software is Open Source: Linux, Python, Ansible, Salt, and Slack (not Open Source but with a free account is enough). So it’s better than cheap, it’s free. I will talk more about this later. ...

Find out how you can tremendously simplify IT support no matter where or when. Using an always online Bot per technology now is simple, straightforward and free. You can even chat with it from your cell phone. Continuing with this saga of posts. Now let’s dive into deep technical use cases. I will do it from a networking perspective just because it’s my main field of knowledge, but since Ansible and Salt are multiplatform, the following use cases are multi-platform in a single playbook. ...

You don’t need a big budget to look smart and efficient. ChatOps and automation bots is easier than you tought. For who? This post could be helpful to any kind company and size: IT related and non-IT related, service provider, from small to large, the scenario is the same. The big difference with medium to large companies is that they have bigger budgets, and in this case, having the technology available to do this, do not actually involve big budgets, because it is free, it’s out there, it’s Open Source. What you need to invest is just a bit in coding/service to adapt the software to your needs. It is not rocket science. I am going to show some basic things here in this post, and after it is only about “train/code” your bot by adding functionalities as times goes on. ...

This is getting extremely fun. After doing some testing with Ansible and Salt, the new integrant of the Netor family is Slack. Yes, a chat platform, and I am going to show how much this can add to the game. By adding some Python to parse the inputs and outputs from Slack and Ansible, it is possible to achieve some super practical things. But wait, let’s first establish some basic concepts in this first part of the post, and then we will go to the good stuff in the next post. ...