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
<hear...@gmail.com<mailto:hear...@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
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