Building Scalable Slack Bots With Go

Relax: a Slack bot framework that helps you build slack bots that scale to 1000s of teams

Transcript

1. building scalable slack bots with Go @iamclovin • getbotmetrics.com • botweekly.com
2. about • Founder of Ze Robot Labs • Have been building Slack bots since May ‘15 • Built Nestor — https://asknestor.me, a “hosted Hubot” that has been installed in 1300+ Slack teams • Built Relax — an open source message broker that lets you build scalable Slack bots • Run botweekly.com
3. 2016 — year of the bots source: On Bots, Conversational Apps and Fin — The Information https://www.theinformation.com/on-bots-conversational-apps-and-fin
4. what is a bot?
5. problem with ruby et al
6. design goals • Handling Messages from 1000’s of teams • De-Coupled from the Web App (with biz logic) • Multiplexed Single Stream of Events • Low Memory Footprint • Ability to run multiple instances of Relax
7. enter relax https://github.com/zerobotlabs/relax
8. architecture
9. implementation • One go routine per team and maintains a persistent websocket connection with Slack • Go routines to handle keeping connection alive, health checks and so on • Use Redis to maintain state and allow Relax to be deployed in a highly available configuration • Events are Slack are converted into JSON blobs and are pushed to a Redis queue which can be consumed by a Rails app • Events are not duplicated as they are sent to the web app no matter how many Relax instances are deployed
10. results • Maintain connections from 1200+ teams on a single Heroku dyno (512MB) • Handle tens of thousands of events on a daily basis without skipping a beat • Allows developers to focus on building great value in the bot itself and not worry about scalability
11. • People don’t want to deal with running & sysadmin’ing a Go daemon (& Redis) • Web developers overlook that with Slack bots you have to maintain websockets and it’s no longer a stateless Request-Response cycle • People don’t know how their bot is doing in terms of analytics/engagement
12. enter botmetrics • “Relax as a Service” • Your web hook is called with JSON blobs that represent Relax events • Bot Metrics for free • Write a single line of code to use Botmetrics: https:// github.com/botmetrics
13. https://getbotmetrics.com
14. q & a @iamclovin • getbotmetrics.com • botweekly.com