Building a serverless Slack bot using Cloudflare Workers
Our Workers platform can be used for a ton of useful purposes: for A/B (multivariate) testing, storage bucket authentication, coalescing responses from multiple APIs, and more. But Workers can also be put to use beyond "HTTP middleware": a Worker can effectively be a web application in its own right. Given the rise of 'chatbots', we can also build a Slack app using Cloudflare Workers, with no servers required (well, at least not yours!).
What are we Building?
We're going to build a Slack bot (as an external webhook) for fetching the latest stock prices.
This Worker could also be adapted to fetch open issues from GitHub's API; to discover what movie to watch after work; anything with a REST API you can make query against.
Nevertheless, our "stock prices bot":
- Uses the Alpha Vantage API to fetch stock prices
- Caches a map of the top equities to their public identifiers, so you can request
/stocks MSFTas a shorthand. - Leverages Cloudflare's cache to minimize the need to hit the API on every invocation, whilst still serving recent price data.
Using the cache allows you to improve your bot's response times across all invocations of your Worker. It's also polite Continue reading
AI in Business: The Practical Reality
IT executives need to start thinking about how they can integrate artificial intelligence into their operations or risk being left behind.
Time for a Summer Break
So many things have happened since I wrote “this is what we’re going to do in 2018” blog post. We ran
- An automation course and a data center course, resulting in three new modules in the automation course, and over 20 hours of fresh content
- Three workshops, two of them brand new and resulting in material for VMware NSX Deep Dive and AWS Networking webinars (both coming in early autumn).
We also did a ton of webinars:
Read more ...Another 10 Years Later
The evolutionary path of any technology can often take strange and unanticipated turns and twists. At some points simplicity and minimalism can be replaced by complexity and ornamentation, while at other times a dramatic cut-through exposes the core concepts of the technology and removes layers of superfluous additions. The evolution of the Internet appears to be no exception and contains these same forms of unanticipated turns and twists. In thinking about the technology of the Internet over the last ten years, it appears that it’s been a very mixed story about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same.SharkFest 2018!! Woot woot! So Excited!
On Saturday I leave North Carolina to head to Sunnyvale, California for…… (insert drumroll here)… SharkFest! I’m am so pumped and excited! I have wanted to attend SharkFest since 2009 when I first learned about it! I’m finally going! Woot woot!
It is not uncommon that I find myself having to explain what SharkFest is… even to diehard WireShark users and enthusiasts. So let me take a step back and explain what SharkFest is.
What is SharkFest?
SharkFest
, launched in 2008, is a series of annual educational conferences staged in various parts of the globe and focused on sharing knowledge, experience and best practices among the Wireshark® developer and user communities.
SharkFest attendees hone their skills in the art of packet analysis by attending lecture and lab-based sessions delivered by the most seasoned experts in the industry. Wireshark core code contributors also gather during the conference days to enrich and evolve the tool to maintain its relevance in ensuring the productivity of modern networks.
https://sharkfestus.wireshark.org/about
Teehee. So basically it is a major WireShark geek fest!!!! And I am STOKED! Who wouldn’t be? Just look at the classes I’ve Continue reading
NSX Cloud Blog Series: Part 1
On the heels of announcing general availability of NSX Cloud on June 5th, we’re pleased to announce that NSX Cloud was selected as Best of Show runners-up in the cloud computing category at Interop Tokyo. The full list of all winners is available here. For those unfamiliar, Interop Tokyo is a major event of over 140,000 attendees, and this award requires an hour presentation including a demo and Q&A to the Interop Committee, so this award came with some scrutiny and we’re proud to have received it.
Let’s deep dive a little into what NSX Cloud is all about. As enterprises make the transition to a hybrid cloud model, new challenges inherent to managing this hybrid cloud model arise, including: how to extend enterprise network policies seamlessly to the cloud, how to have complete operational visibility into traffic flows across your hybrid environment, and how to maintain a consistent security policy across private and public clouds. These are key concerns for Network and Security administrators as well as cloud architects. NSX Cloud is designed to address these requirements.
NSX Cloud together with NSX Data Center provides a uniform operational model across Public Cloud and on-premises Continue reading
BiB 046: Arista 7170 Multi-function Programmable Network Switches
Ethan Banks attended a technical webinar held by Arista Networks talking about their recently announced 7170 series multi-function programmable network switches. In this webinar, Arista explained what the new 7170 switch line was all about. The central reason this switch line exists is programmability.
The post BiB 046: Arista 7170 Multi-function Programmable Network Switches appeared first on Packet Pushers.
The Latest DPDK Release Provides Better Memory Management
From a container perspective the open source group is putting functions in place for dynamic control of DPDK.
IBM Drops Cloud Management Platform Onto Kubernetes
The integration allows users to add self-service platform-as-a-service capabilities to CMS. They can also tap more quickly into IBM analytics, data, middleware, and its Watson artificial intelligence (AI) platform.
INE’s CCIE R&S v5 topology for EVE-NG
The last days I was working on adapting INE‘s lab topology, most specific the CCIE Routing and Switching v5 one, to be used in EVE-NG. In my opinion, INE offers some of the best training materials for Cisco and Juniper certifications. Along certification training you can find in their All Access Pass Subscription valuable learning … Continue reading INE’s CCIE R&S v5 topology for EVE-NGCisco’s Plan to Pull In Cloud Provider Data Center Customers
To win more cloud provider customers Cisco is focusing on helping hyperscalers solve big engineering problems, and it's embracing open networking.