[Beowulf] Lambda and Alexa [EXT]

[John Hearns]

Aha. I did not know about the 8 second limit. I use Alexa with a Philips
smart lighting hub to control house lights. Sometimes nothing happens...
I assumed this was Alexa not understanding a Scottish accent. I forgive
Alexa now - she might have been having trouble talking to the Hue.

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 at 10:21, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:

> Indeed, my main personal experience with Lambda so far has been in writing
> an Alexa skill in my spare time.  It’s been quite fun, and very instructive
> in the benefits and pitfalls of lambda.
>
> My main takehomes so far:
>
> 1.  I love the fact that there’s basically no code at all other than that
> required to deliver the actual skill. Just handler functions for the
> incoming requests (Intents, as Amazon call them)
>
> 2.  Debugging is awkward.  There is no interactive debugging, as far as I
> can tell.   Log inspection is about all you have, and some errors are
> obtuse (for example, some valid Node.js constructs produce syntax errors on
> Lambda, and it’s very hard to track down when it happens - unit tests all
> pass locally but then you get a syntax error in the LogWatch logs, with a
> useless stack trace that doesn’t tell you where the syntax error is).
> Debugging and unit testing on your laptop is hard to do; many Alexa APIs
> rely on real hardware functions and the simulators don’t handle them.
>
> 3.  Persistence of data is fairly straightforward using S3 buckets or
> DynamoDB, and I haven’t noticed latency issues with those (of course the
> interactions are on a human timescale, so latency isn’t really much of an
> issue)
>
> 4.  Interaction with external services can be problematic; Alexa lambda
> functions must return within 8 seconds, which can be fun if your skill
> needs to fetch data from some other source (in my case a rather sluggish
> data service in Azure run by my local council), and there’s no clean way to
> handle the event if you hit the 8 second limit, the function just gets
> terminated and Alexa returns a rather meaningless error to the user.
>
> Tim
>
> On 25 Nov 2020, at 09:45, John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> BTW, I am sure everyone knows this but if you have a home assistant such
> as Alexa everytime you ask Alexa it is a lambda which is spun up
>
>
> -- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a
> charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered
> in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road,
> London, NW1 2BE.
>
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