Alexa skills allow you to expand the voice assistant capabilities beyond what comes out of the box. In addition to more than 30,000 available Alexa skills out there, you can start developing your own skill tomorrow morning. This session will give you an high level review of the different AWS services that can help you develop and run your skill in minutes. We will cover AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and other tools and services that will help you run your skills at scale.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Boaz Zinimian – Technical Evangelist, AWS
March 2018 – The Israeli community for Personal Assistants
Inside the cloud
AWS tools for Alexa skills
@ziniman
boaz.ziniman.aws

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
2006 EC2 & S3
2018 100+ Managed Services
Kinesis Streaming Analytics, Mobile Testing,
Redshift Datawarehouse, Code Deploy/Build
Tools, Elastic Container Service, Application Load
Balancer, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB,
Elastic Map, AI, Reduce
(Hadoop/Spark/Presto/etc), Elastic Beanstalk,
Elastic Transcoder, RDS, Elasticsearch, IoT, more..

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
CORE SERVICES
Integrated Networking
Rules Engine
Device Shadows
Device SDKs
Device Gateway
Registry
Local Compute
Custom Model
Training & Hosting
Conversational Chatbots
Virtual Desktops
App Streaming
Schema Conversion
Image & Scene
Recognition Sharing & Collaboration
Exabyte-Scale
Data Migration
Text to Speech
Corporate Email Application Migration
Database Migration
Regions
Availability Zones
Points of Presence
Data Warehousing
Business Intelligence
Elasticsearch
Hadoop/Spark
Data Pipelines
Streaming Data
Collection
ETL
Streaming Data
Analysis
Interactive SQL
Queries
Queuing & Notifications
Workflow
Email
Transcoding
Deep Learning
(Apache MXNet, TensorFlow,
& others)
Server MigrationCommunications
MARKETPLACE
Business Apps Business Intelligence DevOps Tools Security Networking StorageDatabases
API Gateway
Single Integrated Console
Identity
Sync
Mobile Analytics
Mobile App Testing
Targeted Push
Notifications
One-click App
Deployment
DevOps Resource
Management
Application Lifecycle
Management
Containers
Triggers
Resource Templates
Build & Test
Analyze & Debug
Identity Management
Key Management
& Storage
Monitoring &
Logs
Configuration
Compliance
Web Application Firewall
Assessment
& Reporting
Resource & Usage
Auditing
Access Control
Account
Grouping
DDOS
Protection
TECHNICAL & BUSINESS SUPPORT
Support
Professional
Services
Optimization
Guidance
Partner
Ecosystem Training & Certification Solutions Management Account Management Security & Billing Reports
Personalized
Dashboard
Monitoring
Manage
Resources
Data Integration
Integrated Identity &
Access
Integrated Resource &
Deployment Management
Integrated Devices
& Edge Systems
Resource Templates
Configuration
Tracking
Server
Management
Service Catalogue
Search
MIGRATIONHYBRID ARCHITECTUREENTERPRISE APPSMACHINE LEARNINGIoTMOBILE SERVICESDEV OPSANALYTICS
APP SERVICES
INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY & COMPLIANCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Compute
VMs, Auto-scaling, Load
Balancing, Containers,
Virtual Private Servers,
Batch Computing,
Cloud Functions, Elastic
GPUs, Edge Computing
Storage
Object, Blocks, File,
Archivals, Import/Export,
Exabyte-scale data transfer
CDN
Databases
Relational, NoSQL,
Caching, Migration,
PostgreSQL
compatible
Networking
VPC, DX, DNS
Facial Recognition &
Analysis
Facial Search
Patching
Contact Center
Most robust, fully featured technology
infrastructure platform

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
516
24 48 61 82
159
280
722
1,017
LAUNCHES
2 0 0 8 2 0 0 9 2 0 1 0 2 0 1 1 2 0 1 2 2 0 1 3 2 0 1 4 2 0 1 5 2 0 1 6
1,430
2 0 1 7
New capabilities daily
Pace Of Innovation

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
a e
o
q
r
t
j
i
h
p
Paris
u
l
f
First 5 years: 4 regions
2016–2018: 11 regions
Next 5 years: 7 regions
A W S
REGIONAL
EXPANSION
d
m
c
g
b
n
s
v
i

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Overview of how Alexa works
Request
Audio
Response
Your Service
Text to Speech
Machine Learning
Natural Language
Understanding
Speech Recognition
Cards

7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Technology Overview
Alexa
Enabled
Device
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
S3
Amazon
DynamoDB
IAM
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS IoT
SNS
SES

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM

9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM

10. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
What does Serverless mean?
No servers to
provision or manage
Scale with your usage
Built in availability
and fault-tolerance
Never pay for
idle/unused capacity

11. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS Lambda

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Using AWS Lambda
Bring your own code
• Node.js, Java, Python, C#,
Go
• Bring your own libraries
(even native ones)
Simple resource model
• Select power rating from
128 MB to 3 GB
• CPU and network
allocated proportionately
Flexible use
• Synchronous or
asynchronous
• Integrated with other
AWS services
Flexible authorization
• Securely grant access to
resources and VPCs
• Fine-grained control for
invoking your functions

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Using AWS Lambda
Authoring functions
• WYSIWYG editor or
upload packaged .zip
• Third-party plugins
(Eclipse, Visual Studio)
Monitoring and logging
• Metrics for requests,
errors, and throttles
• Built-in logs to Amazon
CloudWatch Logs
Programming model
• Use processes, threads,
/tmp, sockets normally
• AWS SDK built in (Python
and Node.js)
Stateless
• Persist data using
external storage
• No affinity or access to
underlying infrastructure

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Example event sources
Data stores Endpoints
Configuration repositories Event/message sources
Amazon S3 Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
Cognito
Amazon IoT AWS Step
Functions
Amazon
Alexa
AWS
CloudTrail
AWS
CodeCommit
Amazon
CloudWatch
Amazon SES Amazon SNS Cron events
Amazon
API Gateway
AWS
Cloudformation
…and more!

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Storage for the Internet
• Natively online, HTTP access
• Storage that allows you to store and retrieve
any amount of data, any time, from anywhere on
the web
• Highly scalable, reliable, fast and durable
Amazon S3

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon S3 Concepts
• Designed for 99.999999999%
durability and 99.99% availability
• Amazon S3 stores unlimited
number of objects within buckets
• An object is composed of a file and
optionally any metadata that
describes that file up to 5 TB
• You can have up to 100 buckets in
each account
• You can control access to the
bucket and its objects
Amazon
S3
Bucket
with
Objects
Bucket
Object

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon DynamoDB
Fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any scale
Fast, consistent
performance
Highly scalable Fully managed Business critical
reliability
Consistent single-digit
millisecond latency; DAX in-
memory performance reduces
response times to microseconds
Auto-scaling to hundreds
of terabytes of data that
serve millions of
requests per second
Automatic
provisioning,
infrastructure
management, scaling,
and configuration with
zero downtime
Data is replicated across
fault tolerant Availability
Zones, with fine-grained
access control

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon DynamoDB Powers
Herd is the database system powering customer purchases
Migrated from Oracle to DynamoDB
Extreme scale to handle millions of requests per second
Workflow processing dropped from 1s to 100ms
Prime Day 2017: DynamoDB handled peak of 12.9M requests per
second (an increase from 6.3M) with no increase in latency
Work Item Storage
Partition Assigner
Timer Router
Tim
er
No
des
ode
sdesNo
des
Timer
Hosts
View Router
Tim
er
No
des
No
des
ode
s
No
des
View
Hosts
DynamoDB
Herd is a mission-critical system for Amazon, and we
are extremely confident in DynamoDB as the
technology on which to run it.
Mike Thomas, Software Development Manager, Amazon Herd
“
”

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Demo
Alexa
Enabled
Device
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
IAM
Alexa, ask Boaz when is
the next session?
Trigger Lambda
Function
Load
Permissions
Query
DB

20. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Demo
Alexa
Enabled
Device
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
IAM
Next session for Boaz Ziniman is: Inside
the cloud - AWS tools for Alexa skills
on March 21 at 19:30 in Tel Aviv
Format and
send response

21. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
More Info
Service Overviews:
• aws.amazon.com/lambda
• aws.amazon.com/dynamodb
• aws.amazon.com/s3
• aws.amazon.com/ses
Documentation:
• aws.amazon.com/documentation
AWS Blog:
• aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws

22. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Bonus Services
SQS
IoT Rekognition
CloudWatch Kinesis
Interact with a “thing”
Delayed processing
Image analysis
Transform requests/responses
API Gateway
Lambda S3 Athena QuickSight
+ + + + + = Analyze Skill Logs
Polly
Text to speech

23. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank you!
@ziniman
boaz.ziniman.aws