Getting Started with Amazon Alexa Development: Signing Up To Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Welcome back, folks, to our foray into Amazon Alexa Skill Development. If you’ve visited the blog recently, you’ll notice I’ve been juggling a few subjects for a minute, including SQL. For context, here’s our first article, starting Amazon Alexa skill development from the absolute beginning. (Following my haphazard skill development of Silly Marketing Strategies at the beginning of the year.)

In the previous article, we prepared ourselves for skill development by downloading public sample materials from Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit Github page. Now, we’ll look at Amazon Web Services, one of the world’s largest (is it the largest?) public cloud computing platforms.

First, navigate to https://aws.amazon.com/. Click on “Create an AWS Account”, or equivalent, if you’re seeing something different. Note: this sign-up shouldn’t incur cost for you today, unless you choose otherwise. (Quick disclaimer, I’ll obviously try to supply the most accurate information possible. However, I cannot ultimately guarantee its accuracy. That you must do for yourself.)

Here, you’ll sign up and create a new account or log in. Note: if you have a regular Amazon login, I believe you can use that here. Because I have an existing Amazon account, most of my steps will follow accordingly, however, I’ll try to recreate where I can, like below.

If you’re creating a new account, then you’ll be prompted to choose between a company account and a personal account. Below is a preview of what the personal account signup page might look like.

Next, you’ll be prompted to set up payment options. (Obviously, we’re s electing a free account for the purposes of this educational exploration.)

You’ll next be asked to verify your phone number via a call requesting a PIN shown on screen. From there, you should be able to proceed  to the support plan selection screen, upon which I recommend choosing the free Basic version. After selecting all the appropriate options, you should be able to create your account!

Now that you’ve created an account, click “Sign In to the Console” or “Complete Sign Up”. You’ll re-enter your login credentials and proceed. You should now land on the Developer Console root page. (Note: Amazon, like Google, runs a ton of UI tests, so what you see may be slightly different than the below.)

The first order of business in our new account is to secure it. Click on your name in the top right and in the resulting dropdown menu, select “My Security Credentials”.

Manage / Activate your MFA, and select a virtual device. This means you’ll need to perform some setup so you can scan a QR code with your phone (via Google QR code scanner app). I’ve skipped some illustrations and details here, because I’m not sharing my details, nor should you. What a somber ending to the article! In the next post, we’ll cover signing up for the Alexa Developer Portal, as we get move toward becoming proficient Amazon Alexa Skill Developers.

Zach