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lenny321 avatar image
lenny321 asked

Alexa with AWS

I am fairly new to adding "skills" to Alexa, I am wondering to make something simple and maybe you guys can help. I want to have Alexa launch an aws instance when I say "Alexa, launch an instance" is that doable? if so, is there a detailed guide or can you guys walk me through how to do it? Thank you for your time.
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4 Answers

jjaquinta avatar image
jjaquinta answered
You can write a skill, with which the user registers their AWS credentials, and then have Alexa invoke the skill which uses the AWS API to launch an instance. It's all programmatically possible. I'm not entirely sure that's a good use case for The Echo. "I'm sitting on the couch, drinking a beer, and I want to... launch an AWS instance." Doesn't seem to fit.
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lenny321 avatar image
lenny321 answered
This is great input, where do I find docs that help me start somewhere? Could you go more in depth with your answer? :) you see, if I can have Alexa launch me an instance, I can do anything! please send me whatever is necessary for me to get this where I need :) Thank you for your time!
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jjaquinta answered
The Amazon docs are pretty good. You need the Alexa Skills Kit to write an Alexa Skill. The AWS doc should talk about how to remotely control instances. I've only ever done it manually, but I know that they have APIs for it. It's a pretty standard dev-ops sort of thing.
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Nick Gardner avatar image
Nick Gardner answered
There are SDKs for AWS in a number of languages: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/. These will let you do things from launching EC2 instances to configuring IAM users to getting alarms. I think the best use of a skill like this wouldn't be modifying services, but rather getting information about your services, like any current alarms, load levels, autoscaling status, etc. -Nick
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