ChatOps

Chapter 8. A World Connected by API

The underlying technology of ChatOps relies heavily on the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to leverage the tools and services many of us use in our daily tasks. Over the last decade, APIs have become an integral part of both software development and infrastructure management. Services and tools that many in the software industry use commonly, such as GitHub, Jenkins, and VictorOps, provide API functionality to extend their usefulness beyond their original design. This, along with the efforts and spirit of the open source community, has allowed for further development and enhancements by teams across many disciplines.

A New Interface

Simple yet powerful APIs allow teams to build an abstraction layer as well as an entirely new user interface that better suits their or their organization’s needs. Additionally, APIs allow distinct and disjointed applications to communicate and share information, further integrating and enhancing the overall functionality of the applications as a whole. Through the integration of separate systems via APIs, ecosystems are created that can help a business on a variety of levels. Disparate services that are commonly used independently can be tied together to work in orchestration. One example of this is the ability to automatically trigger infrastructure builds using a tool such as Jenkins when engineers commit new code to a version control repository service such as GitHub.

Within the context of ChatOps, ...