Pipeline notifications in a slack channel via AWS bots

Updated: Jul 11

In these times of remote work and global teams, it's not always easy to know what's going on the other side. One team in Europe could launch a pipeline just before leaving (while you and the tester's team, in the USA, are sleeping). If that day you forgot to check the pipeline's status, only when the tester's team starts the day will you all be informed about a failure in the pipeline.

As DevOps team we are responsible for creating and maintain our CI/CD pipelines, we can't be blocker elements in the SDLC; so, to improve our teams performance we need to anticipate those issues and implement automatic notifications.

Accelerate your operations with automation tools. Automation is the way, it helps not only to run the test but also to provision, deploy, set up, and configure the testing and staging environments.

With AWS Chatbot you will be able to get notifications of it on your Slack channel. You just have to do this!:

Configure your Slack workspace:

Create a Slack channel.
Install AWS Chatbot (https://www.slack.com/apps/A6L22LZNH-aws-chatbot) and invite it to the channel:

/invite

Configure chatbot client:

Create a new Slack client on the chatbot console (https://aws.amazon.com/chatbot/).
Assign permissions to the channel where you want to send the notifications. You can have more than one channel, and report different pipelines in different channels.

Configure pipeline notifications:

Create a notification for every pipeline.
Set the actions you want to notify.
In targets, Choose AWS chatbot and the channel where you want to show the notifications.

The next time a pipeline runs, all your team will be notified of the pipeline execution result.

This way we remove dependencies between members of the staff, ensure everyone is notified of the latest status of the project, and reduce the time of action between the pipeline's end and the staff notifications, allowing faster remediation actions or the testing of the released project. In other words, we introduce agility to our project.

Other things we can report by using this chatbot are:

Health Check status alarms
Budgets notifications
GuardDuty / Security Hub findings

You can use notifications to help developers to stay informed about the key events happening in their software development life cycle. You can set up notification rules for build projects, deployment applications, pipelines, and repositories, and stay informed about key events such as pull request creation, comments made on your code or commits, build state/phase change, deployment project status change, manual pipelines approval, or pipeline execution status change.

When you run your pipeline, you get the expected results. If you need help, do not hesitate to contact us, we will advise you to accelerate digital innovation!