At its core ChatOps means building tools that make it easier to operate your infrastructure via a Bot than via the Terminal … by placing tools directly in the middle of the conversation everyone is pairing all the time ~ Jesse Newland

ChatOps is all about conversation-driven development. The idea, put simply, is that team members interacting with each other in a chat room can issue commands that a bot listens to and is configured to execute. These commands can range from deploying code to retrieving logs to provisioning new services. ChatOps, in a very real sense, helps to integrate people, bots and tools together in an automated and transparent way.

At last week’s Talis Hackday I worked on “powering up” Lord Zeus, our Hubot plug-in to Hipchat. Hubot can be great fun and amazingly useful. We added scripts that were both.