SEATTLE & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Slack Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: WORK) announced a new multi-year agreement to deliver solutions for enhanced enterprise workforce collaboration. Slack and AWS will strategically partner to help distributed development teams communicate and become more efficient and agile in managing their AWS resources from inside Slack. Slack will migrate its Slack Calls capability for all voice and video calling to Amazon Chime, AWS’s communications service that lets users meet, chat, and place business calls. Slack is also leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure to support enterprise customers’ rapid adoption of its platform and to offer them data residency – the ability to choose which country or region their data is stored at rest in while fulfilling compliance requirements. Slack continues to rely on AWS as its preferred cloud provider and will use a range of AWS services, including storage, compute, database, security, analytics, and machine learning, to develop new collaboration features. Additionally, AWS has agreed to use Slack to simplify the way teams at AWS communicate and work together.

Enterprise customers can rely on Slack’s channel-based messaging solution, combined with AWS’s proven infrastructure and security services, for secure, reliable, and scalable communication. Slack and AWS will also extend product integration and deepen interoperability to help developer teams manage their AWS resources in Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms with greater flexibility. These integrations include:

• Amazon Chime infrastructure with Slack Calls: Amazon Chime SDK (software development kit) will soon power audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities in native Slack Calls. By relying on Amazon Chime to power its real-time communication, Slack will leverage AWS’s proven infrastructure to deliver high-quality and reliable user experiences while eliminating the cost and complexity of maintaining its own unified communications infrastructure.
• AWS Key Management Service with Slack Enterprise Key Management (EKM): For EKM, Slack leverages AWS’s proven security services, including AWS Key Management Service for distribution and control of cryptographic keys. Designed for security-conscious or regulated enterprise customers who seek increased visibility and control over their data in Slack, over 90 companies are now using the solution to manage their own encryption keys. Enhancements, such as EKM for Slack’s Workflow Builder automation tool were released last month.
• AWS Chatbot integration with Slack: AWS Chatbot is a service that uses an interactive agent to help development teams stay updated, collaborate, and respond more quickly to operational events, security findings, workflows, and other alerts for applications running in AWS accounts. Only recently generally available, AWS Chatbot is already in use by many thousands of teams around the world to improve the application development process. Going forward, the AWS Chatbot service will incorporate AWS’s more than 175 services to give developers the ability to collaborate with their teams to manage all of their cloud-based services without leaving Slack.
• Amazon AppFlow integration with Slack: The new Amazon AppFlow integration for Slack enables users to securely transfer data between Slack and AWS services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Redshift, simplifying tasks such as analyzing trends in customer engagement from helpdesk requests or measuring sentiment data. In the coming months, AWS and Slack will enhance this capability, enabling customers to transfer data bi-directionally between multiple Slack channels and AWS services in a single flow.

Microsoft has banned the use of the free version of Slack for its 100,000+ employees. GeekWire reports that Microsoft has a list of prohibited apps and services, and even Amazon Web Services (AWS. Using AWS as its IT infrastructure has helped Slack achieve an astonishing growth rate and a multibillion-dollar valuation with a platform that supports speed of innovation and responsiveness, reliability, and security features to ensure the confidentiality of customer information.

“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack. “Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers. By integrating AWS services with Slack’s channel-based messaging platform, we’re helping teams easily and seamlessly manage their cloud infrastructure projects and launch cloud-based services without ever leaving Slack.”

“Together, AWS and Slack are giving developer teams the ability to collaborate and innovate faster on the front end with applications, while giving them the ability to efficiently manage their backend cloud infrastructure,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “AWS customers gain a powerful new means of managing their AWS resources that will help teams collaborate and build more applications using the broadest and deepest set of cloud services. We look forward to working with Slack to expand the ways we can help our customers innovate in the cloud.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Slack

Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.

Slack is an awesome tool that we love. It makes it easy for teams to communicate with each other and with their automated systems. It can also make a great tool in the management of your AWS infrastructure.

Some of you might be familiar with the term ‘ChatOps’ whereby you make common commands executable from within chat rooms. It was originally coined by GitHub to describe their growing culture of “putting tools in the middle of the conversation”.

It gives you control where you need it. Also, it enables everyone in that room to have visibility of what’s happening across their technology stack in near real-time.

AWS Automation For Slack

In the case of AWS Automation, this helps empower developers to own and shape their own infrastructure. It also keeps the folks in the Finance department happy that the company is developing a cost conscious culture.

That’s why we felt it essential to give all paying GorillaStack customers access to their environment and configurations through Slack.

UPDATE! We got so much feedback from our customers about how awesome our Slack integration is, that we decided to build a separate standalone bot. Now, you don’t even need a GorillaStack account to monitor all your CloudTrail Events from within Slack!

Sign up for our FREE AWS Slackbot now – no need to even be a GorillaStack customer!

Track CloudTrail Events in Slack in Real Time

How do you manage configuration mistakes in a timely manner?

The accepted standard is that you would pore through logs and identify an issue which could have bought down parts of your infrastructure or caused a security breach. Working through event logs to identify root cause is tricky and often too late after the fact of any type of incident (though incidentally if that is a method that appeals, you should think about using Athena to query your CloudTrail).

The optimal way is to get alerted to any breaches concerning CloudTrail Events in Real Time via Slack. In this way, you can remediate as issues arise immediately and not weeks later when the damage is done.

Track CloudWatch Alarms in Slack

Additionally, AWS announced that you can use AWS Lambda to post CloudWatch alarms and other simple notifications to your team’s Slack channel as an incoming webhook to track IT operations.

The blueprints that AWS has created, enables the construction of chat-based tools that participate in conversations within Slack. There are a handful of blueprints available at launch, including slack-echo- for writing bots that can respond to commands, cloudwatch-alarm-to-slack- for writing bots that provide status reports and notifications.

We have witnessed first hand how powerful this can be. Using GorillaStack’s Slack integration, our users have put control in the hands of the developers who use the resources day to day, and not just the central DevOps team that traditionally manages the cloud configuration and is responsible for AWS cost savings.

At GorillaStack, our philosophy is to empower and enable end-user developers to be responsible for their own infrastructure.

Manage EC2 Instances in Slack

If you’re managing multiple EC2 instances and have several developers that need to use certain instances at different times, it can be quite a hassle to manage them.

GorillaStack helps you manage multiple AWS instances without leaving them on all the time and running up the cost. With proper tags in place, we can easily target a service or an environment.

Through GorillaStack’s new Slack integration, you can automate and manage a bunch of your AWS tasks and tools that help you turn instances on / off or snoozes them. You can even run and monitor Auto Scaling groups from your Slack channel following a one-time configuration within the GorillaStack app.

If you add in GorillaStack’s alerting capabilities, you can keep your team notified and up-to-date as to the status of your critical systems through your Slack channel too. You can configure AWS billing alerts based on surpassing thresholds or just regular updates.

Aws Slack Bot

These simple concepts can be very powerful in practice and help make everyone more productive.

By building tools like GorillaStack into a chat room, you can automate commands by a bot,. Communication doesn’t become an afterthought to operational processes but with time, it becomes core to how you operate.

If you don’t already have a GorillaStack account, you can try it for free here.

First published on 28 Dec 2016 by Chris Ellis. Updated on 11 Feb 2021 by Oliver Berger.

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