Adding Call handling logic to Amazon Connect

22nd of May, 2019 / / No Comments

This is the third article in a series where we are taking a look at Amazon Connect. In this article, we will add some logic handling to our “Contact Flow” by adding a basic IVR. However, if you haven’t been following along, I highly advise you go back and review our previous articles:

  1. Getting Started with Amazon Connect – In this article, we set up a new Amazon Connect Instance by walking through the Setup Wizard
  2. Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect – Once we’ve got our new Connect instance, we walk through the process of setting up our first contact flow

If there is a feature that you’d like to see a blog article on, post a note in the comments.… [Keep reading] “Adding Call handling logic to Amazon Connect”

Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect

21st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

In our last article on Amazon Connect, we walked through the process of setting up a new Amazon Connect Tenant. In this article, we are going to set up a basic call flow and a Direct In Dial Number (DID) so that we can start accepting inbound phone calls. Future articles, we will be adding additionality functionality (such as Chatbots and automated scripts) to help automate some of our interactions. This article continues our series on the Amazon Connect contact center as a service.… [Keep reading] “Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect”

Getting Started with Amazon Connect

21st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

This article is the first in a series of articles where we will be taking a look at Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service. This first article wakes through the steps required to get an Amazon Connect (hereby referred to simply as connect) instance up and running. Future articles will look at implementing additional features and logic and how they might be used to provide additional value.

Get Started

Getting things started is as simple as logging into your AWS account and browsing to the Connect Management console.… [Keep reading] “Getting Started with Amazon Connect”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 17th May 2019

17th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s been over a month since my last AWS Weekly Update, so we’ve got quite a lot to cover in this weeks update. There have been quite a few releases over the last month that help to solve a wide array of issues and provide more functionality for cloud architects. From New AWS Lambda support to new features in the world of EC2 management. And let’s not forget one of the big announcements I’ve personally been waiting for, the Transit Gateway support for Direct Connect.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 17th May 2019”

Introducing GraphQL API – A Historical Preview

10th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

 

Application Programming Interface, commonly known as API, is a set of functions that allow downstream applications capability to access the features or data of a black box business application. In the current age of computer applications, APIs are abundantly available and are the cornerstone of business strategies; however, the beginning of APIs consisted of confusing approaches related to documentation and implementation of the code coupled with the high code complexity. Initially, the concepts of middleware, such as CORBA and RPC, capable of some interoperability gave rise to API frameworks, such as SOAP.… [Keep reading] “Introducing GraphQL API – A Historical Preview”

Export Azure IaaS VM properties, including NIC IP address to CSV, #PromptPowerShell

8th of May, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Originally posted on Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter.

The other day I needed to export some data from Azure. I needed an output of all the IaaS VM instances high level configuration for a customer. Namely I needed the resource group, the hostname and the IP address of the instances to forward across for some cross reference analysis.

Now, I’ve had the unfortunate mishap of losing my PowerShell script repo during the change over / migration from my Macbook to my current Surface Pro.… [Keep reading] “Export Azure IaaS VM properties, including NIC IP address to CSV, #PromptPowerShell”

Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1

6th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Over the Easter holidays, while watching my son play with his radio-controlled toy car, I had a strange thought pop into my head. Instead of using the sticks on the remote control, won’t it be cool to control the car by using just your voice? You could tell the car to move forward, backward, left or right. What if you could save all the moves you have asked the car to take so far and then at a later time, get the car to replay all those moves?… [Keep reading] “Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1”

Generating and Configuring Free SSL Certs for Azure Windows IaaS Virtual Machines

27th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Infrastructure-as-a-Service has provided the ability to quickly deploy hosts in Cloud environments such as Azure. However the certificate that comes with the host isn’t ready for Web Services. I hadn’t had to do this for quite some time and it came to my realisation again that whilst there are a few guides available they are for different scenarios than what I require. In my development environments I’m looking for an SSL Certificate that;

  • is free
  • can be verified through HTTP verification methods (not DNS as we obviously don’t own the *.
… [Keep reading] “Generating and Configuring Free SSL Certs for Azure Windows IaaS Virtual Machines”

A Look at AWS Organizations’ new SCP Controls

26th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Today I’m going to cover off a new feature that was recently announced for AWS Organizations around the use and function of Service Control Policies (SCPs). These new fine-grained controls enabled a wide range of capabilities that have previously been unavailable for customers using a multi-account setup. Previously, when setting up an SCP a user had the option of allowing and denying access to particular Actions within the AWS platform, for example denying access to delete IAM roles.… [Keep reading] “A Look at AWS Organizations’ new SCP Controls”

Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources

17th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

I was recently at a customer site, to perform an environment review of their AWS real-estate. As part of this engagement, I was going to do an inventory of all their AWS resources. Superficially, this sounds like an easy task, however when you consider the various regions that resources can be provisioned into, the amount of work required for a simple inventory can easily escalate.

Not being a big fan of manual work, I started to look at ways to automate this task.… [Keep reading] “Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources”