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Are you interested in learning how to apply Amazon Alexa Skills to common development tasks?
This course explains and demonstrates how to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying a Java project to the cloud using Amazon Alexa Skills with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).
Course Overview
This content will help you gain an understanding of core CI/CD concepts. We start by covering aspects of CI/CD process automation using tools provided by AWS, Jenkins, Blue Ocean and Maven. We then gain the skills needed to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying a Java project to the cloud using Amazon Alexa Skills. We learn how to do this by integrating the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) with AWS services like Lambda and Elastic Beanstalk.
Learning Objectives
- Recognize and explain core concepts of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
- Recognize and work with Jenkins Pipeline and Blue Ocean
- Extend Amazon Alexa by developing a custom Alexa Skill using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
- Integrate Alexa with other AWS services like Lambda and Elastic Beanstalk
Intended Audience
Software Developers, Build and Release Engineers, Alexa Enthusiasts.
Prerequisites
To get the most from this content we recommend you have an understanding of the following areas
- Basic knowledge of the principles of software engineering and development
- Basic knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and an AWS account
- Basic knowledge of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
- Basic knowledge of the Alexa Voice Service (AVS)
We recommend the following content to gain an understanding of these concepts
DevOps Fundamentals
DevOps Playbook - CI/CD Tools and Services
Feedback
We welcome all feedback on content please reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com with any questions or comments.
This is the final step to connect the front-end voice user interface portion of the skill to the back-end business logic of the skill found in the AWS lambda function. I've navigated to the Alexa developer portal and now let's set up the endpoint. So notice, I'm on the build tab and now I'm going to click on endpoint. The endpoint is the destination where your skill request should be sent.
So this is the back-end lambda that invokes the Jenkins API. Notice here on this endpoint page, I've selected AWS lambda ARN, and I've entered my lambda's ARN number here. Now, all requests will be sent to my lambda. Scroll down a bit and notice here, there's this https option which can be used to connect the front-end of this skill to a different back-end. This could be an https web service that you manage, maybe one created using PHP or another language. Computer, open DevOps pal.
- [Alexa] Welcome to DevOps pal. I can launch your Jenkins pipeline. Start by saying deploy my code.
- [Instructor] Deploy my code.
- [Alexa] Your code is being deployed. You can check the status via your Jenkins Blue Ocean pipeline page.
Lectures
Kesha Williams (pronounced KEY-SHA) is an award-winning software engineering manager with over 20 years’ experience. She's passionate about emerging technologies, speaking, teaching, and mentoring. She's trained thousands of software engineers in the US, Europe, and Asia while teaching at the university level. She routinely leads innovation teams in proving out emerging technologies and shares her learnings at technical conferences around the globe. She recently won the Ada Lovelace Award in Computer Engineering from Look Far and the Think Different Innovation Award from Chick-fil-A for her work with Artificial Intelligence (AI). She was recently featured in Amazon's "Alexa Women of Voice" campaign and named an Alexa Champion. In her spare time, she leads the Georgia chapter of Technovation, writes news for InfoQ, authors video courses, and mentors women in tech.
To learn more about me, visit my website at http://www.kesha.tech