Getting started with Serverless and Alexa development



(Image Credit/Source: Amazon Blog)

More and more I see myself tinkering around with serverless development.

To get started, I had to decide what I was going to use for development, so I started with installing node.js.

Node.js is available for multiple operating systems and can be downloaded here.

Once I downloaded node.js, I used npm to install serverless, e.g.:

npm install -g serverless

I set up my credentials using the following command:

serverless config credentials --provider aws --key AKexampleKey --secret wJalrexampleSecret

You can also install the ask (Alexa Skills Kit) cli using npm:

npm install -g ask-cli

As I plan on doing Alexa skill development, I need to associate my AWS profile with my Alexa development profile.  Excellent documentation provided by AWS can be found here.

I initialized the ask cli with the AWS account (using a key and secret set up previously):

ask init --aws-setup

I then associate the Amazon Developer account with the ask cli:

ask init

We can now start to create our Alexa skill and any associated Lambda functions that would be called as part of the skill, e.g.: ask new and ask deploy.



Popular posts from this blog

Home built blob storage server

Image
In the hopes of creating a "blob" like storage like Amazon S3 , I recently did a Google for open source blob storage.  To my pleasure, I discovered minio .  Minio allows me to expose an S3 compatible service locally on my home network.  I can now work with large datasets in a S3-like fashion locally without having the overhead of dealing with an Internet connection. I can also set up Minio to be a gateway to Amazon S3 or even to my local Hadoop cluster . I also am able to set up the AWS CLI to interact with minio or have the minio client interact with AWS S3. While redundancy can be implemented with minio, I'll save that as a project for later. I picked up a Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB model from Amazon ($150) and a 8 TB external USB drive from Costco ($120).  One can always step down to a lower model / storage space if needed - just couldn't resist the savings on an 8 TB drive from Costco. :) I downloaded the Raspbian Lite image , set up regionalization and my hostname.
Read more

Home built Hadoop analytics cluster: Part 3

Home built Hadoop analytics cluster: Part 3 In my previous post I covered Bill of Materials (BOM), hardware assembly, and installing Linux (Ubuntu).  In this post I will cover how I installed Ambari. Installing Ambari Rather than build from source, I opted to use the distribution from Cloudera (formerly HortonWorks). Ambari 2.7.5 requires official support from Cloudera, so I went down to 2.7.3 which doesn't require a support agreement with Cloudera. Install some pre-requisites sudo apt install python-dev sudo apt install gcc Add Cloudera as a distribution sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ambari.list http://public-repo-1.hortonworks.com/ambari/ubuntu18/2.x/updates/2.7.3.0/ambari.list sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com B9733A7A07513CAD sudo apt-get update Verify packages show up apt-cache showpkg ambari-server apt-cache showpkg ambari-agent apt-cache showpkg ambari-metrics-assembly Install and setup the server on primary sudo apt-get install ambari-se
Read more

Home built Hadoop analytics cluster: Part 4

Image
Home built Hadoop analytics cluster: Part 4 So yay!  As mentioned for my next goals in my previous post , I finally got the remaining two boxes built out and added into my home network.  I opted to put the Hadoop cluster on it's own subnet with a dedicated unmanaged switch only for the cluster (primary and nodes). I added the agent and metrics to all of the nodes and rebooted the servers. Then I followed the instructions to set up the cluster, naming it "ds730" after the class that I'm currently taking - DS730: Big Data - High Performance Computing. I also made sure I had DNS setup correctly by modifying /etc/systemd/resolved.conf and fixed my name resolution issues. Removed firewall rules. Removed timedatectl by doing: sudo timedatectl set-ntp no Then installed ntp: sudo apt install ntp Now I need to look at installing some database drivers, however I think I'm going to call it a night.  
Read more