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Overview

Slacker was developed at Origin Energy as part of the Jindabyne initiative. While not part of our core IP, it proved valuable internally, and we're sharing it in the hope it's useful to others.

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Kudos to Origin for fostering a culture that empowers its people to build complex technology solutions in-house.

Slacker (aka JinSlacker) sends messages from AWS services to Slack channels.

This is hardly revolutionary, and there are other mechanisms to achieve this in an AWS environment. These mechanisms are fine if you're happy with limited control of where messages can come from or go to, as well as having your Slack channels filling up with the incomprehensible gibberish produced in a typical AWS environment.

Features:

  • Message content analysis using regular expressions and JSON parsing
  • Message routing and filtering based on message source, content, and time of day
  • Message content rewriting using Jinja templates.

Currently supported AWS sources are:

  • SNS
  • CloudWatch logs
  • Amazon EventBridge
  • Direct invocation.

What about AWS Chatbot?

AWS Chatbot can also integrate with Slack. Unlike slacker, it also has some limited interactive capability.

Subjectivity warning ...

Slacker is much more flexible in it's ability to do dynamic content analysis, and message routing and rewriting. We also believe slacker is simpler to deploy and use. We'd argue that the interactive capabilities of the AWS Chatbot solution are so limited by the (essential) security restrictions as to be of marginal value in a real operational environment.