Engineers were running commands on their laptops, or clicking around a web UI without a lot of transparency or context about who was doing what. Coordinating with the rest of the team was an extra step or afterthought. — Aaron Suggs Operations Engineering Manager at Kickstarter

If uncoordinated action happens within a small team, it can be manageable. Throw in a larger team, remote working, time zones, security needs, and differing experience levels into the mix, and coordination becomes essential, yet extremely difficult to realize. This is where Cog can help — it allows you to start securely coordinating your workflows in chat, providing much-needed transparency to your entire team.

Aaron Suggs (Operations Engineering Manager at Kickstarter) and Kyle Burckhard (Senior Operations Engineer) are ahead of the DevOps + ChatOps curve. They have lots of custom automation already in place, and were evaluating several different ChatOps platforms when Operable approached them with a proposition: let’s take a look at which of your current workflows are causing you the most pain and see if we can come up with a set of commands for Cog that can help make a better experience for your team.

They were game, and so Aaron and his team worked with Mark Imbriaco and Matthew Peck of Operable to tackle their thorny CloudFormation management workflow with Cog.