How Slack Uses Chef

Slack's Security Engineering team describes how they built an AI agent-based system to automate and streamline security investigations.

This article details Slack's journey through a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) assessment for their Android app, conducted by a third-party vendor in 2024 following their IA4 UI red...

Slack's build pipeline team reduced build times for Quip and Slack Canvas from 60 minutes to as little as 10 minutes by applying classic software engineering principles—separation of concerns, cach...

This article details Slack's approach to making Chef infrastructure deployments safer by splitting a single production Chef environment into six bucketed environments (prod-1 through prod-6) mapped...

Slack's Deploy Safety Program, launched in mid-2023, achieved a 90% reduction in customer impact hours by January 2025 through automated detection, remediation, and cultural changes across all depl...

The article discusses the development of Slack's Anomaly Event Response (AER), a proactive security mechanism designed to detect and respond to suspicious activities in real-time.

The article discusses how Slack's DevXP team optimized their end-to-end (E2E) testing pipeline, significantly reducing build times and eliminating unnecessary frontend builds.

The article discusses the development of Slack's enterprise search functionality, emphasizing its security and privacy features.

The article discusses the implementation of automated accessibility testing at Slack, highlighting the integration of the Axe accessibility testing tool into their existing testing frameworks.

The article 'Break Stuff on Purpose' discusses the importance of intentionally causing failures in systems to improve recovery processes and enhance resilience.

The article discusses Slack's audit logs and the detection of anomalous activity within its platform.

The article discusses the redesign of Astra's chunk management system, transitioning from fixed-size chunks to dynamic chunks to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

The article discusses how Slack trains its engineers in incident response through a unique exercise called the Incident Lunch.

The article discusses how Slack is utilizing AI-powered tools to enhance developer productivity and streamline processes.

The article discusses a challenging bug encountered while integrating Quip's technology into Slack, focusing on TCP state management and EOFError issues.

The article 'Driving a Project: Intern Edition' provides insights into how interns can successfully deliver meaningful projects during their internships.

The article discusses the evolution of Slack's Chef infrastructure, focusing on enhancing safety and scalability through a transition from a single Chef stack to a sharded infrastructure.

The article discusses the importance of empathy in engineering, particularly in creating inclusive user experiences.

The article discusses the re-architecture of Slack's backend to create the Unified Grid, aimed at improving user experience for large customers by providing a single view of data across multiple wo...

This article details Slack's migration from AWS EMR 5 with Spark 2 to EMR 6 with Spark 3, highlighting the challenges faced and the performance improvements achieved.

The article discusses proactive measures taken by Slack to enhance user security against password breaches and cookie hijacking.

The article discusses how Slack automatically detects stolen session cookies to enhance user security.

The article discusses advanced rollout techniques for stateful applications in Kubernetes, focusing on the development of the Bedrock Rollout Operator at Slack.

This article discusses Slack's transition from Enzyme to React Testing Library (RTL) for frontend testing, highlighting the challenges and solutions encountered during the conversion of over 15,000...

The article explores the significant contributions of women in the Data Engineering team at Slack, highlighting their roles in managing complex data systems and fostering a diverse work culture.

The article discusses the development of Slack AI with a focus on ensuring security and privacy for customer data.

The article discusses the complexities and challenges of automating deployments at Slack, particularly in a monolithic service environment.

The article discusses Slack's migration from AWS Instance Metadata Service version 1 (IMDSv1) to version 2 (IMDSv2), emphasizing the security enhancements and challenges faced during the transition.

The article discusses enhancements made to the Workflow Builder in Slack, focusing on the implementation of custom animations to improve user experience.

The article discusses the management of Slack Connect, a feature that enables communication between different Slack workspaces through shared channels.

The article discusses a critical incident experienced by Slack's Datastores team due to a spike in database load from a mass user deletion, leading to failed queries and system instability.

The article discusses the experiences of interns in Slack's Data Engineering team, highlighting their impactful projects such as the Reliable Data Discovery Tool and the Job Performance Tracking an...

The article discusses the evolution of cron script execution at Slack, detailing the challenges faced with reliability and scalability.

The article details Kate Liu's experience as a return intern at Slack, focusing on how to leverage past experiences to maximize the internship's value.

The article 'Traffic 101: Packets Mostly Flow' provides an in-depth look at how Slack processes billions of network requests daily through its edge network and AWS infrastructure.

Slack has migrated its critical user-facing services from a monolithic architecture to a cellular architecture over the past 1. 5 years.

The article discusses the Service Delivery Index (SDI-R) as a crucial metric for driving a culture of reliability within Slack's engineering organization.

The article discusses the architecture and implementation of Slack's real-time messaging system, detailing how messages are sent and received across millions of channels globally.

The article discusses the complexities and solutions involved in tracing notifications within Slack's infrastructure.

The article discusses the Technology Lifecycle framework used by Slack to manage the development, support, and retirement of infrastructure projects.

The article discusses Hakana, an open-source type checker for Hack, developed by Slack to enhance code quality and security.

The article discusses the migration to a non-transitive R class in Android development, detailing the process, benefits, and challenges faced by the Slack engineering team.

The article discusses the challenges and experiences encountered while building GovSlack, a version of Slack designed for government agencies, utilizing AWS GovCloud infrastructure.

The article discusses how Slack utilizes Terraform for managing its infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, including AWS, DigitalOcean, NS1, and GCP.

The article discusses the Mobile Developer Experience Team at Slack, focusing on how they enhance developer productivity and satisfaction through targeted improvements in the mobile development pro...

This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to effectively mentor interns to develop into skilled engineers.

The article provides an insightful glimpse into the daily routine of Georgi Knox, a Senior Cloud Engineer at Slack Australia.

The article discusses the importance of asking for help as an intern, particularly in a software engineering context.

The article discusses the experiences of three interns in Slack's Data Engineering team during a hybrid summer internship.

The article discusses the Recommend API developed by Slack, which serves as a unified framework for generating recommendations using machine learning.