Show HN: Your DevOps Control Plane, in Slack (opens in new tab)

Founder here - can you clarify what you mean by "data plane"?

We let you aggregate events and process metrics, should you want to use our platform as the way you aggregate event driven workflows or calculate delivery metrics.

You can run your entire workload on our serverless environment or you can push your workloads to your existing CI/CD + cloud computes - it's really up to you!

Hey Jason, Ruxandra here from the CTO.ai team!

You have the freedom to build your DevOps workflows as you please, by leveraging our SDKs to interact with the tools and platform you use daily for DevOps. The Slack interface allows you to customize the inputs and trigger these workflows as you desire, but--once triggered--you will not necessarily depend on Slack being up. Hope that makes sense!

Also, the workflows you automate using our platform work in the CLI as well. So you build once, you get a containerized automation which you can use either locally in your CLI, or in Slack. For running these locally, you have to install our `ops` CLI on your machine (more on this here: https://cto.ai/docs/start-building-ops).

Let me know if that helps clarify your questions or if you have any other questions. Thanks!

Founder here - great question.

The way this works is that you first build a CLI, which is a container and then you publish it to us so that it also runs in Slack. It's shared code that runs in both environments.

So if Slack is ever down, you still have the CLI.

The big benefit here is that you build once and it runs in both places which means don't need a separate runbook or even infra to make your CLI run in Slack - it's 100% serverless.

For our users the Ops engineers obviously prefer the CLI, but the Dev's really love Slack - this creates a nice balance in the DX that works on both sides, on top of existing CI/CD.

Founder here - we agree. ChatOps has traditionally required you to build out a specific solution for Chat, which failed the cost of ownership equation, after you consider the cost of setting up servers, code and chat specific logic to run your workflows. Hubot is a good example but we've taking it way further and rethought DevOps from a Slack first perspective.

With CTO.ai your existing CLI "just works" in Slack and you have none of the additional overhead but get all of the benefits of chat such as distribution, transparency and collaboration as well. It's a big paradigm shift.

Many of our users are going all in because of this!

Thanks for your feedback! We'll keep iterating!

Founder here - Since a workflow in the context of CTO.ai is just a container, which executes your code, you can build out as robust permissions as you need to by leveraging our vault integration, configs and teams.

Currently, our teams are a basic ACL that lets you manage who in Slack can run the workflow, but we also allow you to associate any of your teams to private channels, so you can more granularly control access using Slack's user membership.

We're looking at more RBAC on top of this for enterprise but for most smaller teams, this covers the majority of their use cases. They often create a team for ops and a team for dev and then associate these teams to members + channels as needed.

Ruxandra here from the engineering team at CTO.ai. Thought I'd jump in and say we have some cool examples in our registry, covering automations with various products offered by the popular cloud providers, as well as workflows around creating, managing and destroying Kubernetes clusters, and so much more: https://cto.ai/registry.

I certainly have a soft spot for the K8s ones especially as I helped build them :-)

(cto.ai employee here) The obvious ones are any basic CICD operation that you might want to trigger from Slack, i.e: pull code, build code, deploy code. The second use case that comes to mind is treating the platform as a very quick way to build an all purpose SlackBot.

Founder here - 100% not. We've build a specialized PaaS that ensures your credentials and workflows are encrypted and there is no additional security vector here. Also Slack is one of our investors and they have worked with us a great deal to make sure that the security is handled properly!

Maybe I am misunderstanding what CTO.ai does. GitHub actions are for CI/CD pipelines. Where as CTO is a bot for interfacing with webhooks over chat. The broader term would be ChatOps. Something more comparable in the Github world would Hubot. Jesse Newland has some good lectures about why you would want to do this. Many of the examples come down to visibility of work in remote teams, and creating cleaner interfaces to useful products. There are a number of tools, many people use day to day because they are useful, that have terrible interfaces. You also see some organizations consolidating things like knowledge bases. Apologies if I have generalized CTO.ai in a way that is incorrect.

full disclosure: I work for CTO.ai. It is a similar concept really, but the Ops Platform has a built in interop layer for communicating between the containers & slack channels.

Absolutely. We have about 5 that are currently in the works that cover many different use case from our community. We’ll be sharing soon on our blog so please keep an eye out for them!