New Ways to Discover and Use Alexa Skills

Introducing New Features That Make It Easier for Customers to Discover
and Use Your Alexa Skills

Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based voice service, powers voice experiences on
millions of devices, including Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, Amazon Tap,
Amazon Fire TV devices, and devices like
Triby
that use the Alexa Voice Service. One year ago, Amazon opened up Alexa
to developers, enabling you to build Alexa skills with the Alexa Skills
Kit
and integrate Alexa into your own products with the Alexa Voice
Service.
Today, tens of thousands of developers are building skills for Alexa,
and there are over 1,400 skills for Alexa – including Lyft and
Honeywell, which were added today.

A New Experience for Discovering Skills

Today, we announced new ways for customers to discover and use the
Alexa skills that developers have built, including a new voice-enablement feature and a completely
redesigned Alexa app. Customers can now quickly search, discover and use
skills. Starting today, customers can browse Alexa skills by
categories such as “Smart Home” and “Lifestyle” in the Alexa app, apply
additional search filters, and access their previously enabled skills
via the “Your Skills” section.

Also available today, Alexa customers can use their voice to enable your
skills: simply say “Alexa, enable NBC News” or “Alexa, enable 7 Minute
Workout” and access them instantly. Customers can also find your skills
with Amazon's Skill Finder. To use Skill Finder, simply enable it via
voice or in the Alexa app and say "Alexa, ask Skill Finder for the top
skills."

One-Year Anniversary: ASK, AVS and The Alexa Fund

In addition to the new Alexa skill features, June 25th marked the
one-year anniversary of our developer services. Last June, we introduced
the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), the Alexa Voice Service (AVS), and the Alexa
Fund to help enable anyone to build the experience they wanted for
Alexa. Some fun facts about the Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa Voice Service,
and Alexa Fund include:

• There are now over 1,400 Alexa skills and the catalog has grown by 50% in just over one month




• Customers have made over 3 million requests using the top 10 most popular Alexa skills




• Since January 2016, selection of Alexa smart home API skills has grown by more than 5x




• There are now over 10,000 registered developers using the Alexa Voice Service to integrate Alexa into their products




• There are tens of thousands of developers currently working on Alexa projects




• The Alexa Fund has invested in 16 startups, with a focus on smart home and wearable products to date. Over the next year, The Alexa Fund will be expanding investments into startups that focus on robotics, developer tools, healthcare, accessibility and more




• Some of the most popular Alexa skills are Jeopardy!, Daily Affirmation, Magic 8 Ball, Fitbit, and The Bartender

Build a Skill Today - Special Offers

Our skill templates and step-by-step guides are a valuable way to
quickly learn the end-to-end process for building and publishing an
Alexa skill. You can get started quickly using the flash cards skill
template,
fact skill
template,
trivia skill
template,
or how to skill
template.
Plus, if you publish a skill, you'll receive an Alexa dev t-shirt.
Quantities are limited. See Terms and
Conditions. 

Additional Resources

For more information on getting started with
devloping for Alexa, check out the following resources:

Alexa Developer Platform

• Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)


• Alexa Voice Service (AVS)


• The Alexa Fund


• ASK Developer Forums

Voice Design Education

• Voice Design 101 (On Demand Webinar)


• Intro to ASK (On Demand Webinar)


• Alexa on Udemy


• Weekly Office Hours

Elastic Network Adapter – High Performance Network Interface for Amazon EC2

Many AWS customers create high-performance systems that run across multiple EC2 instances and make good use of all available network bandwidth. Over the years, we have been working to make EC2 an ever-better host for this use case. For example, the CC1 instances were the first to feature 10 Gbps networking. Later, the Enhanced Networking feature reduced latency, increased the packet rate, and reduced variability. Through the years, the goal has remained constant-ensure that the network is not the bottleneck for the vast majority of customer workloads.

We've been talking to lots of customers and watching technology trends closely. Along with a short-term goal of enabling higher throughput by providing more bandwidth, we established some longer-term goals for the next generation of EC2 networking. We wanted to be able to take advantage of the increased concurrency (more vCPUs) found in today's processors, and we wanted to lay a solid foundation for driver support in order to allow our customers to take advantage of new developments as easily as possible.

I'm happy to be able to report that we are making great progress toward these goals with today's launch of the new Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) to provide even better support for high performance networking. Available now for the new X1 instance type, ENA provides up to 20 Gbps of consistent, low-latency performance when used within a Placement Group, at no extra charge!

Per our longer-term goals, ENA will scale as network bandwidth grows and the vCPU count increases; this will allow you to take advantage of higher bandwidth options in the future without the need to install newer drivers or to make other changes to your configuration, as was required by earlier network interfaces.

ENA Advantages
We designed ENA to work well in conjunction with modern processors, such as those found on X1 instances. Because these processors feature a large number of virtual CPUs (128 in the case of  X1), efficient use of shared resources such as the network adapter is important. While delivering high throughput and great packet per second (PPS) performance, ENA minimizes the load on the host processor in a number of ways, and also does a better job of distributing the packet processing workload across multiple vCPUs. Here are some of the features that enable this improved performance:

• Checksum Generation – ENA handles IPv4 header checksum generation and TCP / UDP partial checksum generation in hardware.


• Multi-Queue Device Interface – ENA makes uses of multiple transmit and receive queues to reduce internal overhead and to increase scalability. The presence of multiple queues simplifies and accelerates the process of mapping incoming and outgoing packets to a particular vCPU.


• Receive-Side Steering – ENA is able to direct incoming packets to the proper vCPU for processing. This reduces bottlenecks and increases cache efficacy.

All of these features are designed to keep as much of the workload off of the processor as possible and to create a short, efficient path between the network packets and the vCPU that is generating or processing them.

Using ENA
In order to make use of ENA,  you need to use our new driver and tag the AMI as having ENA support.

The new driver is available in the latest Amazon Linux AMIs and will soon be available in the Windows AMIs. The Open Source Linux driver is available in source form on GitHub for use in your own AMIs. Also, a driver for the Intel^® Data Plane Developer Kit (Intel^® DPDK) is available for developers that are building network processing applications such as load balancers or virtual routers.

If you are creating your own AMI, you also need to set the enaSupport attribute when you register it. Here's how you do that from the command line (see the register-image documentation for a full list of parameters):

$ aws ec2 register-image --ena-support ...

You can still use the AMI on instances that do not support ENA.

Going Forward
As noted earlier, ENA is available today for X1 instances. We are also planning to make it available for future EC2 instance types.

-
Jeff;

Check Out the Upgraded Kindle Paperwhite

Just like the Basic Kindle, Paperwhite is also getting an upgrade and will be available on June 30, earlier than Kindle's release which is on the 7th of next month.  Well, not much has changed though.  Both upgraded e-readers will be available in an ivory white model and a Bluetooth connectivity to support … Continue reading Check Out the Upgraded Kindle Paperwhite →

Make Homemade Yogurt in a Digital Rice Cooker!

If you are looking for kitchen tools to help you whip up some healthy meals, the Mini Tim3 Machin3 should be number one on your list.  New on Amazon Exclusives, this Digital Rice Cooker allows you to steam meat, fish, poultry or veggies while cooking your rice, quinoa or oatmeal below.  After prepping your hearty … Continue reading Make Homemade Yogurt in a Digital Rice Cooker! →

The Cheapest Kindle Just Got Better, Still at $79.99

Today, Amazon introduced the new and improved Kindle e-reader.  Compared to the previous generation, this newbie is thinner, lighter and has twice the memory – all for the same price. Now, you can get it in the color white, which was not available before.  Another first for the cheapest Kindle would also be … Continue reading The Cheapest Kindle Just Got Better, Still at $79.99 →

You Might Just Have Free Amazon Credits from Apple

Three years ago, Apple was found guilty of conspiring with five major book publishers to manipulate and raise the prices of e-books to exceed the price limit that Amazon has established.  As a result, the Supreme Court wants Apple to pay $400 million worth of damages to consumers as a payback amount. So, … Continue reading You Might Just Have Free Amazon Credits from Apple →

New – Cross-Account Copying of Encrypted EBS Snapshots

AWS already supports the use of encrypted Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and snapshots, with keys stored in and managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS). It also supports copying of EBS snapshots with other AWS accounts so that they can be used to create new volumes. Today we are joining these features to give you the ability to copy encrypted EBS snapshots between accounts, with the flexibility to move between AWS regions as you do so.

This announcement builds on three important AWS best practices:

1. Take regular backups of your EBS volumes.


2. Use multiple AWS accounts, one per environment (dev, test, staging, and prod).


3. Encrypt stored data (data at rest), including backups.

Encrypted EBS Volumes & Snapshots
As a review, you can create an encryption key using the IAM Console:

And you can create an encrypted EBS volume by specifying an encryption key (you must use a custom key if you want to copy a snapshot to another account):

Then you can create an encrypted snapshot from the volume:

As you can see, I have already enabled the longer volume and snapshot IDs for my AWS account (read They're Here – Longer EBS and Storage Gateway Resource IDs Now Available for more information).

Cross-Account Copying
None of what I have shown you so far is new. Let's move on to the new part! To create a copy of the encrypted EBS snapshot in another account you need to complete four simple steps:

1. Share the custom key associated with the snapshot with the target account.


2. Share the encrypted EBS snapshot with the target account.


3. In the context of the target account, locate the shared snapshot and make a copy of it.


4. Use the newly created copy to create a new volume.

You will need the target account number in order to perform the first two steps. Here's how you share the custom key with the target account from within the IAM Console:

Then you share the encrypted EBS snapshot. Select it and click on Modify Permissions:

Enter the target account number again and click on Save:

Note that you cannot share the encrypted snapshots publicly.

Before going any further I should say a bit about permissions! Here's what you need to know in order to set up your policies and/or roles:

Source Account – The IAM user or role in the source account needs to be able to call the ModifySnapshotAttribute function and to perform the DescribeKey and ReEncypt operations on the key associated with the original snapshot.

Target Account – The IAM user or role in the target account needs to be able perform the DescribeKey, CreateGrant, and Decrypt operations on the key associated with the original snapshot. The user or role must also be able to perform the CreateGrant, Encrypt, Decrypt, DescribeKey, and GenerateDataKeyWithoutPlaintext operations on the key associated with the call to CopySnapshot.

With that out of the way, let's copy the snapshot…

Switch to the target account, visit the Snapshots tab, and click on Private Snapshots. Locate the shared snapshot via its Snapshot ID (the name is stored as a tag and is not copied), select it, and choose the Copy action:

Select an encryption key for the copy of the snapshot and create the copy (here I am copying my snapshot to the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region):

Using a new key for the copy provides an additional level of isolation between the two accounts. As part of the copy operation, the data will be re-encrypted using the new key.

Available Now
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is available. It is designed for use with data & root volumes and works with all volume types, but cannot be used to share encrypted AMIs at this time. You can use the snapshot to create an encrypted boot volume by copying the snapshot and then registering it as a new image.

-
Jeff;

 

Alexa, Meet Your New Competitors.

Alexa, Amazon's famous voice service that powers the Echo, Dot and Tap is quickly becoming the most popular smart home assistant.  With over 1,000 skills, these Alexa-powered devices have certainly become a staple in many homes.  Echo, in particular, has already sold an estimated 3 million since its debut. Now, with the constant … Continue reading Alexa, Meet Your New Competitors. →

Guest Post – Zynga Gets in the Game with Amazon Aurora

Long-time AWS customer Zynga is making great use of Amazon Aurora and other AWS database services. In today's guest post you can learn about how they use Amazon Aurora to accommodate spikes in their workload. This post was written by Chris Broglie of Zynga.

-
Jeff;

---

Zynga has long operated various database technologies, ranging from simple in-memory caches like Memcached, to persistent NoSQL stores like Redis and Membase, to traditional relational databases like MySQL. We loved the features these technologies offered, but running them at scale required lots of manual time to recover from instance failure and to script and monitor mundane but critical jobs like backup and recovery. As we migrated from our own private cloud to AWS in 2015, one of the main objectives was to reduce the operational burden on our engineers by embracing the many managed services AWS offered.

We're now using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon ElastiCache (Memcached and Redis) widely in place of their self-managed equivalents. Now, engineers are able to focus on application code instead of managing database tiers, and we've improved our recovery times from instance failure (spoiler alert: machines are better at this than humans). But the one component missing here was MySQL. We loved the automation Amazon RDS for MySQL offers, but it relies on general-purpose Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for storage. Being able to dynamically allocate durable storage is great, but you trade off having to send traffic over the network, and traditional databases suffer from this additional latency. Our testing showed that the performance of RDS for MySQL just couldn't compare to what we could obtain with i2 instances and their local (though ephemeral) SSDs. Provisioned IOPS narrow the gap, but they cost more. For these reasons, we used self-managed i2 instances wherever we had really strict performance requirements.

However, for one new service we were developing during our migration, we decided to take a measured bet on Amazon Aurora. Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database offered through Amazon RDS. Aurora was only in preview when we started writing the service, but it was expected to become generally available before production, and we knew we could always fall back to running MySQL on our own i2 instances. We were naturally apprehensive of any new technology, but we had to see for ourselves if Aurora could deliver on its claims of exceeding the performance of MySQL on local SSDs, while still using network storage and providing all the automation of a managed service like RDS. And after 8 months of production, Aurora has been nothing short of impressive. While our workload is fairly modest – the busiest instance is an r3.2xl handling ~9k selects/second during peak for a 150 GB data set – we love that so far Aurora has delivered the necessary performance without any of the operational overhead of running MySQL.

An example of what this kind of automation has enabled for us was an ops incident where a change in traffic patterns resulted in a huge load spike on one of our Aurora instances. Thankfully, the instance was able to keep serving traffic despite 100% CPU usage, but we needed even more throughput. With Aurora we were able to scale up the reader to an instance that was 4x larger, failover to it, and then watch it handle 4x the traffic, all with just a few clicks in the RDS console. And days later after we released a patch to prevent the incident from recurring, we were able to scale back down to smaller instances using the same procedure. Before Aurora we would have had to either get a DBA online to manually provision, replicate, and failover to a larger instance, or try to ship a code hotfix to reduce the load on the database. Manual changes are always slower and riskier, so Aurora's automation is a great addition to our ops toolbox, and in this case it led to a resolution measured in minutes rather than hours.

Most of the automation we're enjoying has long been standard for RDS, but using Aurora has delivered the automation of RDS along with the performance of self-managed i2 instances. Aurora is now our first choice for new services using relational databases.

- Chris Broglie, Architect (Zynga)

 

Amazon Fire Kids Edition Gets a Major Bug

Do your kids own a Kindle Fire or subscribed to Kindle Freetime Unlimited?  Did they spontaneously lose their data or their registration info?  Don't worry, you are not alone. As evidenced by a bunch of complaints on the e-commerce site's Kindle forum, the current misbehavior that you are experiencing is a known issue … Continue reading Amazon Fire Kids Edition Gets a Major Bug →

Amazon Cuts Shipping Fees to Attract More Merchants

In an attempt to help merchants who sell small-bore items, Amazon is reportedly cutting its shipping costs by as much as 67% for items such as small tech accessories (USB cables, smartphone screen protectors, etc.), household items like toothbrushes, makeup and any other small, flat items that can fit in envelopes.  Once the … Continue reading Amazon Cuts Shipping Fees to Attract More Merchants →

Discounted Amazon Fire TV. This week only!

If you've been eyeing the Amazon Fire TV for a while already, then good news because the retail giant is giving a 15% discount this week. Unlike Apple TV and Chromecast, this nifty device is compatible with 4K Ultra HD TVs, which gives you a true-to-life picture quality viewing experience.   You can watch … Continue reading Discounted Amazon Fire TV. This week only! →

iMessage Gets a Major Overhaul

Last June 13th, Apple delivered his Keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco where he talked about the new features that the four operating systems will have.  However, the keynote was mostly about the iOS 10 upgrade which will be available to the public this Fall, together with the watchOS, … Continue reading iMessage Gets a Major Overhaul →

9 UPS Workers Injured, $350K Civil Fine is Proposed Against Amazon

On Monday, the US Federal Aviation Administration said that they will be proposing the largest penalty they have ever imposed on Amazon, $350,000 for the alleged violation of the hazardous materials regulations. The incident took place last October 15, 2014 when Amazon sent a package with a gallon of corrosive drain cleaner – … Continue reading 9 UPS Workers Injured, $350K Civil Fine is Proposed Against Amazon →

Is Amazon Planning to Compete with Spotify?

According to a report from Reuters, the e-commerce giant is planning to launch a stand-alone music streaming subscription.  As of today, you can only stream music through an add-on feature available on your $99 annual Prime Subscription. Amazon hasn't confirmed it yet but sources said that the service is expected by early Fall … Continue reading Is Amazon Planning to Compete with Spotify? →

Serverless Reference Architectures with AWS Lambda

Building your applications with only managed components has become very popular, and AWS Lambda plays a crucial role in that. I see a tremendous interest in examples how to build such applications, and articles such as "The Serverless Start-Up - Down With Servers!" about teletext.io are read eagerly around the globe.

If you are looking for more examples there are the Lambda Serverless Reference Architectures that can serve as the blueprint for building your own serverless applications.

Mobile Backend Serverless Reference Architecture

The Mobile Backend reference architecture demonstrates how to use AWS Lambda along with other services to build a serverless backend for a mobile application. The specific example application provided in this repository enables users to upload photos and notes using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon API Gateway respectively. The notes are stored in Amazon DynamoDB, and are processed asynchronously using DynamoDB streams and a Lambda function to add them to an Amazon CloudSearch domain. In addition to the source code for the Lambda functions, this repository also contains a prototype iOS application that provides examples for how to use the AWS Mobile SDK for iOS to interface with the backend resources defined in the architecture.

Real-time File Processing Serverless Reference Architecture

The Real-time File Processing reference architecture is a general-purpose, event-driven, parallel data processing architecture that uses AWS Lambda. This architecture is ideal for workloads that need more than one data derivative of an object. This simple architecture is described in the "Fanout S3 Event Notifications to Multiple Endpoints" blog post on the AWS Compute Blog. This sample application demonstrates a Markdown conversion application where Lambda is used to convert Markdown files to HTML and plain text.

Web Applications Serverless Reference Architecture

By combining AWS Lambda with other AWS services, developers can build powerful web applications that automatically scale up and down and run in a highly available configuration across multiple data centers-with zero administrative effort required for scalability, backups, or multi–data center redundancy.

This example looks at using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to build a dynamic voting application, which receives votes via SMS, aggregates the totals into Amazon DynamoDB, and uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)to display the results in real time.

The architecture can be created with an AWS CloudFormation template.

The template does the following:

• Creates an S3 bucket named to hold your web app.


• Creates a DynamoDB table named VoteApp to store votes


• Creates a DynamoDB table named VoteAppAggregates to aggregate vote totals


• Creates a Lambda function that allows your application to receive votes


• Creates a Lambda function that allows your application to aggregate votes


• Creates an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role and policy to allow Lambda functions to write to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and write and query the DynamoDB tables

IoT Backend Serverless Reference Architecture

The Internet of Things (IoT) Backend reference architecture demonstrates how to use AWS Lambda in conjunction with Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon CloudWatch to build a serverless system for ingesting and processing sensor data. By leveraging these services, you can build cost-efficient applications that can meet the massive scale required for processing the data generated by huge deployments of connected devices.

This repository contains sample code for all the Lambda functions depicted in this diagram as well as a AWS CloudFormation template for creating the functions and related resources. There is also a simple webpage that you can run locally to publish sample events and query the data from DynamodDB.

Real-time Stream Processing Serverless Reference Architecture

You can use AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis to process real-time streaming data for application activity tracking, transaction order processing, click stream analysis, data cleansing, metrics generation, log filtering, indexing, social media analysis, and IoT device data telemetry and metering. The architecture can be created with an AWS CloudFormation template.

The template does the following:

• Creates a Kinesis Stream


• Creates a DynamoDB table named stackname-EventData


• Creates Lambda Function 1 (stackname-DDBEventProcessor) which receives records from Kinesis and writes records to the DynamoDB table


• Creates an IAM Role and Policy to allow the event processing Lambda function read from the Kinesis Stream and write to the DynamoDB table


• Creates an IAM user with permission to put events in the Kinesis stream together with credentials for the user to use in an API client

Techy Gifts Under $100 for Father's Day

Father's Day is nearby, have you already got the dad in your life the gift that he really wants?  Forget the traditional neck tie, “World's Best Dad” Mug, wrist watch or new socks… win this year's “Best Son/Daughter” status by choosing from this list of techy gift ideas that are under $100! Samsung Bluetooth … Continue reading Techy Gifts Under $100 for Father's Day →

Count Calories with the Help of Alexa

If you are one to track your food intake, good news because Alexa can now assist you on your journey to a healthy and fit life.  Amazon announced its collaboration with Nutritionix, the largest verified database of nutrition information, to track the food you eat and add them to your food log. “We're … Continue reading Count Calories with the Help of Alexa →

New AWS Competency – AWS Migration

More and more, I hear from customers who want to migrate large-scale workloads to AWS, and seek advice regarding their cloud migration strategy. We provide customers with a number of cloud migration tools and services, including the AWS Database Migration Service, and resources, such as the AWS Professional Services Cloud Adoption Framework. Further, we have a strong and mature ecosystem of AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting and Technology Partners who've demonstrated expertise in helping customers like you successfully migrate to AWS.

In an effort to make it as easy as we can for you to identify APN Partners who've demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in migration, I'm pleased to announce the launch of the AWS Migration Competency.

New Migration Competency – Migration Partner Solutions
Migration Competency Partners provide solutions or have deep experience helping businesses move successfully to AWS, through all phases of complex migration projects, discovery, planning, migration and operations.

The AWS Partner Competency Program has validated that the partners below have demonstrated that they can help enterprise customers migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS.

Categories and Launch Partners

Migration Delivery Partners – Help customers through every stage of migration, accelerating results by providing personnel, tools, and education in the form of professional services. These partners either are, or have a relationship with an AWS audited Managed Service Provider to help customers with ongoing support of AWS workloads. Here are the launch partners:

• 2nd Watch


• Accenture


• Classmethod, Inc.


• ClearScale


• Cloud Technology Partners


• cloudpack


• Cloudreach


• Cognizant Technology Solutions


• CorpInfo


• CSC


• FPT Software


• Infosys


• Logicworks


• REAN Cloud


• Serverworks


• Slalom Consulting


• Smartronix

Migration Consulting Partners – Provide expertise and training to help enterprises quickly develop specific capabilities or achieve specific outcomes. They provide consulting services to enable adoption of DevOps practices, to modernize applications, and implement solutions. Here are our launch partners:

• Apps Associates


• Aquilent


• Datapipe


• Flux7


• Pythian


• TriNimbus

Migration Technology for Discovery & Planning – Discover IT assets across your application portfolio, identify dependencies and requirements, and build your comprehensive migration plan with these technology solutions. Here are our launch partners:

• Atadata


• Cloudamize


• RISC Networks

Migration Technology for Workload Mobility – Execute migrations to AWS by capturing your host server, configuration, storage, and network states, then provision and configure your AWS target resources. Here are our launch partners:

• Racemi


• CloudEndure


• Atadata

Migration Technology for Application Profiling – Gain valuable insights into your applications by capturing and analyzing performance data, usage, and monitoring dependencies before and after migration. Here are our launch partners:

• New Relic


• AppDynamics


• Dynatrace Ruxit

Launch Partners in Action
Do you want to hear from a few of our launch Partners? Visit the videos below to hear Cloud Technology Partners (CTP), REAN Cloud, and Slalom discuss the evolution of enterprise cloud migrations, and the value of the AWS Migration Competency for customers:

Cloud Technology Partners – The Evolution of Cloud Migration

---

 

REAN Cloud – the Role of DevOps in Cloud Migrations

---

 

Slalom – The Value of the AWS Migration Competency for Customers

-
Jeff;