Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

Last week we had our “TechSummit” and VMware and as part of the event their was a hackathon where team or individuals could sign-up and enter a cool integration into the competition. In the true spirit of a hackathon Tom Bonanno and I decided to do something cool. That something we named vRealize Voice Automation.

The goal:

To be able to utilize the Amazon Echo to create, destroy, power on, & off workloads in vRealize Automation

The Solution:

Using the Amazon Alexa skills API we were able to create a new Alexa skill with three intents:

Deploy Server

Destroy Server

Power Server

These intents combined with what Amazon calls Utterances allow us to take the speech input and determine variables within the speak for items like “blueprint” or “hostname”. That we then could use. The input taken from the Alexa API is then sent to some node.js code that is hosted on Amazon Lambda where we looked at the intent that was called and the variable values associated with and we then make a Rest API call to VMware vRealize Orchestrator invoke a workflow and pass the parameters to it as inputs. From there vRO talks to vRA and success.

It is certainly a cool solution, but remember the Alexa doesn’t always hear what you want it to hear and that can be catastrophic if your performing a destroy operation as you will see in the following videos.

Below are two videos. One is a commercial that was made for our hackathon entry and the other is a demonstration of the integration in action and a bit more on how we did it.



vRVA Commercial







vRVA Demo



