building your own slack bot on the aws stack

Building your own Slack bot on the modern AWS stackAndrew CarreiroPlatform Architect, Klick Health

Demo

Basic Structure

SlackChat app that lets us POST data by typing /8ball

Amazon API GatewayReceives the request from Slack, and routes the request to Lambda

Amazon LambdaEvaluates the chat command, and returns a response.

Amazon DynamoDBNoSQL backend for the app

API Gateway

Lambda

DynamoDB

/8ball Should I try AWS?

POSTInvokes

Possible answers are saved & read

Responds

Responds

“Absolutely!” 8

DynamoDB

Why DynamoDB?

- Need for this app: persistent data store across requests- A JSON file on S3 also a possibility given scale- Something like Redis (Amazon Elasticache) could also work, but price

prohibitive- DynamoDB pricing structure is confusing, but you get 25GB storage and

~200M requests per month in the Free Tier

API Gateway

Lambda

DynamoDB

/8ball Should I try AWS?

POSTInvokes

Possible answers are saved & read

Responds

Responds

“Absolutely!” 8

Writing the Lambda Function

What is Amazon Lambda?

- Old method: I need a server to execute my code- Server sits idle sometimes, other times is completely overwhelmed

- Use AWS computing power, and be billed by the 100ms- Theoretically infinitely scalable, if you have the money- Can run Node, Java, or Python

Coding for Lambda

- Amazon Lambda uses Node.js: v0.10.36- Deployment in it’s most basic state involves a manual zip upload

- lightweight is best-- adding Babel.js was a pain for uploads

- Expect your tests to work locally

Coding for Lambda

Create a user and credentials for what you need:https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?region=us-east-1#users

~/.aws/config

[default]output = jsonregion = us-east-1

Coding for Lambda: Config and Credentials

~/.aws/credentials

[default]aws_access_key_id = LINDNWVQQKAKP7BIA5TXaws_secret_access_key = L4Q8mgs4o4dO4qe3RBbXPSZPfhOQFnj1U2dlDn30

Lambda Example Code

Deploying Lambda

Approaches

https://github.com/mentum/lambdaws

https://github.com/jaws-framework/JAWS

Manual Lambda setup

API Gateway

Lambda

DynamoDB

/8ball Should I try AWS?

POSTInvokes

Possible answers are saved & read

Responds

Responds

“Absolutely!” 8

Setting up API Gateway

API Gateway

Lambda

DynamoDB

/8ball Should I try AWS?

POSTInvokes

Possible answers are saved & read

Responds

Responds

“Absolutely!” 8

Adding a Slash Command on Slack

GitHub Repogithub.com/andrewcarreiro/slack-8ball

RyanRay URL Encoding gisthttps://gist.github.com/ryanray/668022ad2432e38493df

Klick Health is hiring!

Thanks