After some time the Status will read CREATE_COMPLETE . In the Outputs tab you can see interesting information about the created resources, here you can get the WebsiteURL key, which points to the WordPress installation. You can go there and verify that your Wordpress works and finish the installation by setting up a username and a password for the admin editor.

With that done, let’s install Opsidian to help us manage the newly created AWS resources.

Installing Opsidian.ai

Go to http://opsidian.ai/ and click the Add to Slack button. You will be redirected to a Slack’s page where you can choose your Slack team. Click it to install Opsidian.

Click it to install Opsidian

Now, you have Opsidian.ai installed in your Slack. You can verify it by executing the /ops help command in any channel. But hey ! Opsidian’s installation is not complete just yet. We still need to give it access to our AWS account.

The first message by Opsidian.

The first message by Opsidian.

Opsidian needs a read only IAM role created to access your resources, to make this easy it provides a CloudFormation template, which can create the role for us. Let’s do it by clicking the Launch Stack link in the message above. Assuming we are still logged into our AWS Web Console, we should now be redirected to the CloudFormation stack creation page in the AWS Web Console. Just fill in the parameter called SlackTeamName . It should match your Slack team name ! I will use chatsoft , since that is my Slack team’s name.

Now click Next and wait for your stack to create the role, it should not take long. In the Outputs tab you will see the role’s ID, it starts with arn:aws:iam…

Now go back to your Slack and execute the following command. It will bind your Opsidian bot to the role you have just created.

/ops account add name=MyAccount arn=arn:aws:iam..THE ROLE ID region=eu-west-1

Congratulations! Now your Opsidian.ai installation is complete. Let’s play with it a bit.

Fist let’s see the instances running. Remember, I chose two instances to be created, so after executing /ops ec2 list instances we should see something like that:

My WordPress instances

Great news, both of the instances are running. Let’s see some details of the second one.

/ops ec2 show instance i-634e55f4

Neat, we can see that it was created by CloudFormation, just as the tags suggest. But we also have a load balancer, in AWS it is called ELB. Let’s see how things are with it.

/ops elb list balancers

Let’s see some details about this guy, there is a command for that too. It takes a balancer’s name as an argument.

/ops elb show balancer MyWordPre-ElasticL-9IP322PD33T9

Yup, it shows us some more information now. We even can see the DNSName of our ELB, which points to our WordPress blog. Let’s see some information about our database, in AWS the relational database service is called RDS.

/ops rds list instances

There it is, our database. Remember if you do not remember the commands, Opsidian provides help with /ops help, you can also visit the website https://opsidian.ai/commands for a reference. Even better, Opsidian allows you to query using natural language. Just ask.

/ops rds what instances do we have running?