Getting Started with PySpark for Big Data Analytics, using Jupyter Notebooks and Docker

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Big Data, Python, Software Development on November 19, 2018

Introduction

There is little question, big data analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning (a subcategory of artificial intelligence) have all experienced a tremendous surge in popularity over the last few years. Behind the hype curves and marketing buzz, big data, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) are influencing all aspects of our modern lives. Due to their popularity and potential benefits, academic institutions and commercial enterprises are rushing to train large numbers of Data Scientists and ML and AI Engineers.

Learning popular technologies, such as Python, Scala, R, Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Apache Kafka, requires the use of multiple complex technologies. Installing, configuring, and managing these technologies often demands an advanced level of familiarity with Linux, distributed systems, cloud- and container-based platforms, databases, and data-streaming applications. This may prove a deterrent to Students, Mathematicians, Statisticians, and Data Scientists.

Driven by the explosive growth of these technologies and the need to train individuals, many commercial enterprises, as well as open-source projects are making it easier to get started. The three major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, all have multiple Big Data-, AI- and ML-as-Service-offerings. An excellent example of an open-source project working on this challenge is the Project Jupyter. Similar to the Spark Notebook and Apache Zeppelin projects, Jupyter Notebooks enables data-driven, interactive, and collaborative data analytics with Julia, Scala, Python, R, and SQL.

This post will demonstrate the creation of a containerized development environment, using Jupyter Notebooks. The environment will be suited for learning and developing applications for Apache Spark, using the Scala, Python, and R programming languages. This post is not intended to be a tutorial on Spark, PySpark, or Jupyter Notebooks.

Technologies

The following technologies are featured prominently in this post.

feature

Jupyter Notebooks

According to Project Jupyter, the Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. Uses include data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more. The word, Jupyter, is a loose acronym for Julia, Python, and R, but today, the Jupyter supports many programming languages.

Jupyter Docker Stacks

To enable quick and easy access to Jupyter Notebooks, Project Jupyter has created Jupyter Docker Stacks. The stacks are ready-to-run Docker images containing Jupyter applications, along with accompanying technologies. Currently, eight different Jupyter Docker Stacks focus on a particular area of practice. They include SciPy (Python-based mathematics, science, and engineering), TensorFlow, R Project for statistical computing, Data Science with Julia, and the main subject of this post, PySpark. The stacks also include a rich variety of packages to extend their functionality, such as matplotlib, ggplot2, bokeh, ipywidgets , and Facets.

Apache Spark

According to Apache, Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing, used by well-known, modern enterprises, such as Netflix, Yahoo, and eBay. With speeds up to 100x faster than Hadoop, Apache Spark achieves high performance for static, batch, and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine.

Spark’s polyglot programming model allows users to write applications quickly in Scala, Java, Python, R, and SQL. Spark includes libraries for Spark SQL (DataFrames and Datasets), MLlib (Machine Learning), GraphX (Graph Processing), and DStreams (Spark Streaming). You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on Amazon EC2, Apache Hadoop YARN, Mesos, or Kubernetes.

PySpark

The Spark Python API (PySpark) exposes the Spark programming model to Python. PySpark is built on top of Spark’s Java API. Data is processed in Python and cached and shuffled in the JVM. According to Apache, Py4J enables Python programs running in a Python interpreter to dynamically access Java objects in a JVM.

Docker

According to Docker, their technology developers and IT the freedom to build, manage and secure business-critical applications without the fear of technology or infrastructure lock-in. Although Kubernetes is now the leading open-source container orchestration platform, Docker is still the predominant underlying container engine.

Docker Swarm

Current versions of Docker include swarm mode for natively managing a cluster of Docker Engines, called a swarm. The Docker CLI is used to create a swarm, deploy application services to a swarm, and manage swarm behavior.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. According to their website, PostgreSQL comes with many features aimed to help developers build applications, administrators to protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments, and help manage data no matter how big or small the dataset.

Demonstration

To show the capabilities of the Jupyter development environment, I will demonstrate a few typical use cases, such as executing Python scripts, submitting PySpark jobs, working with Jupyter Notebooks, and reading and writing data to and from different format files and to a database. We will be using the jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image. This image includes Python, R, and Scala support for Apache Spark, using Apache Toree.

Architecture

As shown below, we will stand-up a Docker stack, consisting of Jupyter All-Spark-Notebook, PostgreSQL 10.5, and Adminer containers. The Docker stack will have local directories bind-mounted into the containers. Files from our GitHub project will be shared with the Jupyter application container through a bind-mounted directory. Our PostgreSQL data will also be persisted through a bind-mounted directory. This allows us to persist data external to the ephemeral containers.

Source Code

All open-sourced code for this post can be found on GitHub. Source code samples are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers.

Deploy Docker Stack

To start, create the $HOME/data/postgre directory to store PostgreSQL data files. This directory will be bind mounted into the PostgreSQL container on line 36 of the stack.yml file, $HOME/data/postgre:/var/lib/postgresql/data. The HOME environment variable assumes you are working on Linux or MacOS, and is equivalent to HOMEPATH on Windows.

The Jupyter container’s working directory is set on line 10 of the stack.yml file, working_dir:/home/$USER/work. The local bind-mounted working directory is $PWD/work. This path is bind-mounted to the working directory in the Jupyter container, on line 24 of the stack.yml file, $PWD/work:/home/$USER/work. The PWD environment variable assumes you are working on Linux or MacOS (CD on Windows).

By default, the user within the Jupyter container is jovyan. Optionally, I have chosen to override that user with my own local host’s user account, as shown on line 16 of the stack.yml file, NB_USER: $USER. I have used the MacOS host’s USER environment variable value (equivalent to USERNAME on Windows). There are many options for configuring the Jupyter container, detailed here. Several of those options are shown on lines 12-18 of the stack.yml file.

Assuming you have a recent version of Docker installed on your local development machine, and running in swarm mode, standing up the stack is as easy as running the following command from the root directory of the project:

docker stack deploy -c stack.yml pyspark

The Docker stack consists of a new overlay network, pyspark-net and the three containers. To confirm the stack deployed, you can run the following command:

docker stack ps pyspark --no-trunc

To access the Jupyter Notebook application, you need to obtain the Jupyter URL and access token (read more here). This information is output in the Jupyter container log, which can be accessed with the following command:

docker logs $(docker ps | grep _pyspark | awk '{print $NF}')

Using the URL and token shown in the log output, you will be able to access the Jupyter web-based user interface on localhost port 8888. Once there, from Jupyter dashboard landing page, you should see all the files in the project’s work/ directory.

Also shown below, note the types of files you are able to create from the dashboard, including Python 3, R, Scala (using Toree or spylon-kernal), and text. You can also open a Jupyter Terminal or create a new Folder.

Running Python Scripts

Instead of worrying about installing and maintaining the latest version of Python and packages on your own development machine, we can run our Python scripts from the Jupyter container. At the time of this post, the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image runs Python 3.6.6. Let’s start with a simple example of the Jupyter container’s capabilities by running a Python script. I’ve included a sample Python script, 01_simple_script.py.

Run the script from within the Jupyter container, from a Jupyter Terminal window:

python ./01_simple_script.py

You should observe the following output.

Kaggle Datasets

To explore the features of the Jupyter Notebook container and PySpark, we will use a publically-available dataset from Kaggle. Kaggle is a fantastic open-source resource for datasets used for big-data and ML applications. Their tagline is ‘Kaggle is the place to do data science projects’.

For this demonstration, I chose the ‘Transactions from a Bakery’ dataset from Kaggle. The dataset contains 21,294 rows, each with four columns of data. Although certainly nowhere near ‘big data’, the dataset is large enough to test out the Jupyter container functionality.

Submitting Spark Jobs

We are not limited to Jupyter Notebooks to interact with Spark, we can also submit scripts directly to Spark from a Jupyter Terminal, or from our IDE. I have included a simple Python script, 02_bakery_dataframes.py. The script loads the Kaggle Bakery dataset from the CSV file into a Spark DataFrame. The script then prints out the top ten rows of data, along with a count of the total number of rows in the DataFrame.

Run the script directly from a Jupyter Terminal window:

python ./02_bakery_dataframes.py

An example of the output of the Spark job is shown below. At the time of this post, the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image runs Spark 2.3.1, Scala 2.11.8, Conda 4.5.11, and Java 1.8.0 using the OpenJDK.

More typically, you would submit the Spark job, using the spark-submit command. Use a Jupyter Terminal window to run the following command:

$SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-submit 02_bakery_dataframes.py

Below, we see the beginning of the output from Spark, using the spark-submit command.

Below, we see the scheduled tasks executing and the output of the print statement, displaying the top 10 rows of bakery data.

Interacting with Databases

Often with Spark, you are loading data from one or more data sources (input). After performing operations and transformations on the data, the data is persisted or conveyed to another system for further processing (output).

To demonstrate the flexibility of the Jupyter Docker Stacks to work with databases, I have added PostgreSQL to the Docker Stack. We can read and write data from the Jupyter container to the PostgreSQL instance, running in a separate container.

To begin, we will run a SQL script, written in Python, to create our database schema and some test data in a new database table. To do so, we will need to install the psycopg2 package into our Jupyter container. You can use the docker exec command, or as a superuser, your user has administrative access to install Python packages within the container or using the Jupyter Terminal window. Both pip and conda are available to install packages, see details here.

Run the following command to install psycopg2:

docker exec -it \
  $(docker ps | grep _pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') \
  pip install psycopg2 psycopg2-binary

These packages give Python the ability to interact with the PostgreSQL. The included Python script, 03_load_sql.py, will execute a set of SQL statements, contained in a SQL file, bakery_sample.sql, against the PostgreSQL container instance.

To execute the script, run the following command:

python ./03_load_sql.py

This should result in the following output, if successful.

To confirm the SQL script’s success, I have included Adminer. Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin) is a full-featured database management tool written in PHP. Adminer natively recognizes PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MongoDB, among other database engines.

Adminer should be available on localhost port 8080. The password credentials, shown below, are available in the stack.yml file. The server name, postgres, is the name of the PostgreSQL container. This is the domain name the Jupyter container will use to communicate with the PostgreSQL container.

Connecting to the demo database with Adminer, we should see the bakery_basket table. The table should contain three rows of data, as shown below.

Developing Jupyter NoteBooks

The true power of the Jupyter Docker Stacks containers is Jupyter Notebooks. According to the Jupyter Project, the notebook extends the console-based approach to interactive computing in a qualitatively new direction, providing a web-based application suitable for capturing the whole computation process: developing, documenting, and executing code, as well as communicating the results. Notebook documents contain the inputs and outputs of an interactive session as well as additional text that accompanies the code but is not meant for execution.

To see the power of Jupyter Notebooks, I have written a basic notebook document, 04_pyspark_demo_notebook.ipynb. The document performs some typical PySpark functions, such as loading data from a CSV file and from the PostgreSQL database, performing some basic data analytics with Spark SQL, graphing the data using BokehJS, and finally, saving data back to the database, as well as to the popular Apache Parquet file format. Below we see the notebook document, using the Jupyter Notebook user interface.

PostgreSQL Driver

The only notebook document dependency, not natively part of the Jupyter Image, is the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. The driver, postgresql-42.2.5.jar, is included in the project and referenced in the configuration of the notebook’s Spark Session. The JAR is added to the spark.driver.extraClassPath runtime environment property. This ensures the JAR is available to Spark (written in Scala) when the job is run.

PyCharm

Since the working directory for the project is shared with the container, you can also edit files, including notebook documents, in your favorite IDE, such as JetBrains PyCharm. PyCharm has built-in language support for Jupyter Notebooks, as shown below.

As mentioned earlier, a key feature of Jupyter Notebooks is their ability to save the output from each Cell as part of the notebook document. Below, we see the notebook document on GitHub. The output is saved, as part of the notebook document. Not only can you distribute the notebook document, but you can also preserve and share the output from each cell.

nbviewer

Notebooks can also be viewed using Jupyter nbviewer, hosted on Rackspace. Below, we see a section of this project’s notebook on nbviewer. You can view this project’s actual notebook document, using nbviewer, here.

Monitoring Spark Jobs

The Jupyter Docker container exposes Spark’s monitoring and instrumentation web user interface. We can observe each Spark Job in great detail.

We can review details of each stage of the Spark job, including a visualization of the DAG, which Spark constructs as part of the job execution plan, using the DAG Scheduler.

We can also review the timing of each event, occurring as part of the stages of the Spark job.

We can also use the Spark interface to review and confirm the runtime environment, including versions of Java, Scala, and Spark, as well as packages available on the Java classpath.

Spark Performance

Spark, running on a single node within the Jupyter container, on your development system, is not a substitute for a full Spark cluster, running on bare metal or robust virtualized hardware, with YARN, Mesos, or Kubernetes. In my opinion, you should adjust Docker to support an acceptable performance profile for the stack, running only a modest workload. You are not trying to replace the need to run real jobs on a Production Spark cluster.

We can use the docker stats command to examine the container’s CPU and memory metrics:

docker stats --format "table {{.Name}}\t{{.CPUPerc}}\t{{.MemUsage}}\t{{.MemPerc}}"

Below, we see the stats from the stack’s three containers immediately after being deployed, showing little or no activity. Here, Docker has been allocated 2 CPUs, 3GB of RAM, and 2 GB of swap space available, from the host machine.

Compare the stats above with the same three containers, while the example notebook document is running on Spark. The CPU shows a spike, but memory usage appears to be within acceptable ranges.

Linux top and htop

Another option to examine container performance metrics is with top. We can use the docker exec command to execute the top command within the Jupyter container, sorting processes by CPU usage:

docker exec -it \
  $(docker ps | grep _pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') \
  top -o %CPU

With top, we can observe the individual performance of each processes running in the Jupyter container.

Lastly, htop, an interactive process viewer for Unix, can be installed into the container and ran with the following set of bash commands, from a Jupyter Terminal window or using docker exec:

docker exec -it \
  $(docker ps | grep _pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') \
  sh -c "apt-get update && apt-get install htop && htop --sort-key PERCENT_CPU"

With htop, we can observe individual CPU activity. The two CPUs at the top left of the htop window are the two CPUs assigned to Docker. We get insight into the way Docker is using each CPU, as well as other basic performance metrics, like memory and swap.

Assuming your development machine host has them available, it is easy to allocate more compute resources to Docker if required. However, in my opinion, this stack is optimized for development and learning, using reasonably sized datasets for data analysis and ML. It should not be necessary to allocate excessive resources to Docker, possibly starving your host machine own compute capabilities.

Conclusion

In this brief post, we have seen how easy it is to get started learning and developing applications for big data analytics, using Python, Spark, and PySpark, thanks to the Jupyter Docker Stacks. We could use the same stack to learn and develop for machine learning, using Python, Scala, and R. Extending the stack’s capabilities is as simple as swapping out this Jupyter image for another, with a different set of tools, as well as adding additional containers to the stack, such as Apache Kafka or Apache Cassandra.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients.

Big Data, Bokeh, Data Analytics, docker, Jupyter, Jupyter Notebook, Kaggle, PySpark, Python, Spark

Integrating Search Capabilities with Actions for Google Assistant, using GKE and Elasticsearch: Part 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Cloud, GCP, Java Development, JavaScript, Serverless, Software Development on September 24, 2018

Introduction

Voice and text-based conversational interfaces, such as chatbots, have recently seen tremendous growth in popularity. Much of this growth can be attributed to leading Cloud providers, such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, who now provide affordable, end-to-end development, machine learning-based training, and hosting platforms for conversational interfaces.

Cloud-based machine learning services greatly improve a conversational interface’s ability to interpret user intent with greater accuracy. However, the ability to return relevant responses to user inquiries, also requires interfaces have access to rich informational datastores, and the ability to quickly and efficiently query and analyze that data.

In this two-part post, we will enhance the capabilities of a voice and text-based conversational interface by integrating it with a search and analytics engine. By interfacing an Action for Google Assistant conversational interface with Elasticsearch, we will improve the Action’s ability to provide relevant results to the end-user. Instead of querying a traditional database for static responses to user intent, our Action will access a Near Realtime (NRT) Elasticsearch index of searchable documents. The Action will leverage Elasticsearch’s advanced search and analytics capabilities to optimize and shape user responses, based on their intent.

Action Preview

Here is a brief YouTube video preview of the final Action for Google Assistant, integrated with Elasticsearch, running on an Apple iPhone.

Architecture

If you recall from part one of this post, the high-level architecture of our search engine-enhanced Action for Google Assistant resembles the following. Most of the components are running on Google Cloud.

Source Code

All open-sourced code for this post can be found on GitHub in two repositories, one for the Spring Boot Service and one for the Action for Google Assistant. Code samples in this post are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Development Process

In part two of this post, we will tie everything together by creating and integrating our Action for Google Assistant:

Create the new Actions for Google Assistant project using the Actions on Google console;
Develop the Action’s Intents and Entities using the Dialogflow console;
Develop, deploy, and test the Cloud Function to GCP;

Let’s explore each step in more detail.

New ‘Actions on Google’ Project

With Elasticsearch running and the Spring Boot Service deployed to our GKE cluster, we can start building our Actions for Google Assistant. Using the Actions on Google web console, we first create a new Actions project.

The Directory Information tab is where we define metadata about the project. This information determines how it will look in the Actions directory and is required to publish your project. The Actions directory is where users discover published Actions on the web and mobile devices.

The Directory Information tab also includes sample invocations, which may be used to invoke our Actions.

Actions and Intents

Our project will contain a series of related Actions. According to Google, an Action is ‘an interaction you build for the Assistant that supports a specific intent and has a corresponding fulfillment that processes the intent.’ To build our Actions, we first want to create our Intents. To do so, we will want to switch from the Actions on Google console to the Dialogflow console. Actions on Google provides a link for switching to Dialogflow in the Actions tab.

We will build our Action’s Intents in Dialogflow. The term Intent, used by Dialogflow, is standard terminology across other voice-assistant platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service and LUIS. In Dialogflow, will be building Intents — the Find Multiple Posts Intent, Find Post Intent, Find By ID Intent, and so forth.

Below, we see the Find Post Intent. The Find Post Intent is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a single post about a topic, for example, ‘Find a post about Docker.’ The Intent shown below contains a fair number, but indeed not an exhaustive list, of training phrases. These represent possible ways a user might express intent when invoking the Action.

Below, we see the Find Multiple Posts Intent. The Find Multiple Posts Intent is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a list of posts about a topic, for example, ‘I’m interested in Docker.’ Similar to the Find Post Intent above, the Find Multiple Posts Intent contains a list of training phrases.

Dialog Model Training

According to Google, the greater the number of natural language examples in the Training Phrases section of Intents, the better the classification accuracy. Every time a user interacts with our Action, the user’s utterances are logged. Using the Training tab in the Dialogflow console, we can train our model by reviewing and approving or correcting how the Action handled the user’s utterances.

Below we see the user’s utterances, part of an interaction with the Action. We have the option to review and approve the Intent that was called to handle the utterance, re-assign it, or delete it. This helps improve our accuracy of our dialog model.

Dialogflow Entities

Each of the highlighted words in the training phrases maps to the facts parameter, which maps to a collection of @topic Entities. Entities represent a list of intents the Action is trained to understand. According to Google, there are three types of entities: ‘system’ (defined by Dialogflow), ‘developer’ (defined by a developer), and ‘user’ (built for each individual end-user in every request) objects. We will be creating ‘developer’ type entities for our Action’s Intents.

Automated Expansion

We do not have to define all possible topics a user might search for, as an entity. By enabling the Allow Automated Expansion option, an Agent will recognize values that have not been explicitly listed in the entity list. Google describes Agents as NLU (Natural Language Understanding) modules.

Entity Synonyms

An entity may contain synonyms. Multiple synonyms are mapped to a single reference value. The reference value is the value passed to the Cloud Function by the Action. For example, take the reference value of ‘GCP.’ The user might ask Google about ‘GCP’. However, the user might also substitute the words ‘Google Cloud’ or ‘Google Cloud Platform.’ Using synonyms, if the user utters any of these three synonymous words or phrase in their intent, the reference value, ‘GCP’, is passed in the request.

But, what if the post contains the phrase, ‘Google Cloud Platform’ more frequently than, or instead of, ‘GCP’? If the acronym, ‘GCP’, is defined as the entity reference value, then it is the value passed to the function, even if you ask for ‘Google Cloud Platform’. In the use case of searching blog posts by topic, entity synonyms are not an effective search strategy.

Elasticsearch Synonyms

A better way to solve for synonyms is by using the synonyms feature of Elasticsearch. Take, for example, the topic of ‘Istio’, Istio is also considered a Service Mesh. If I ask for posts about ‘Service Mesh’, I would like to get back posts that contain the phrase ‘Service Mesh’, but also the word ‘Istio’. To accomplish this, you would define an association between ‘Istio’ and ‘Service Mesh’, as part of the Elasticsearch WordPress posts index.

Searches for ‘Istio’ against that index would return results that contain ‘Istio’ and/or contain ‘Service Mesh’; the reverse is also true. Having created and applied a custom synonyms filter to the index, we see how Elasticsearch responds to an analysis of the natural language style phrase, ‘What is a Service Mesh?’. As shown by the tokens output in Kibana’s Dev Tools Console, Elasticsearch understands that ‘service mesh’ is synonymous with ‘istio’.

If we query the same five fields as our Action, for the topic of ‘service mesh’, we get four hits for posts (indexed documents) that contain ‘service mesh’ and/or ‘istio’.

Actions on Google Integration

Another configuration item in Dialogflow that needs to be completed is the Dialogflow’s Actions on Google integration. This will integrate our Action with Google Assistant. Google currently provides more than fifteen different integrations, including Google Assistant, Slack, Facebook Messanger, Twitter, and Twilio, as shown below.

To configure the Google Assistant integration, choose the Welcome Intent as our Action’s Explicit Invocation intent. Then we designate our other Intents as Implicit Invocation intents. According to Google, this Google Assistant Integration allows our Action to reach users on every device where the Google Assistant is available.

Action Fulfillment

When a user’s intent is received, it is fulfilled by the Action. In the Dialogflow Fulfillment console, we see the Action has two fulfillment options, a Webhook or an inline-editable Cloud Function, edited inline. A Webhook allows us to pass information from a matched intent into a web service and get a result back from the service. Our Action’s Webhook will call our Cloud Function on GCP, using the Cloud Function’s URL endpoint (we’ll get this URL in the next section).

Google Cloud Functions

Our Cloud Function, called by our Action, is written in Node.js. Our function, index.js, is divided into four sections, which are: constants and environment variables, intent handlers, helper functions, and the function’s entry point. The helper functions are part of the Helper module, contained in the helper.js file.

Constants and Environment Variables

The section, in both index.js and helper.js, defines the global constants and environment variables used within the function. Values that reference environment variables, such as SEARCH_API_HOSTNAME are defined in the .env.yaml file. All environment variables in the .env.yaml file will be set during the Cloud Function’s deployment, described later in this post. Environment variables were recently released, and are still considered beta functionality (gist).

The npm module dependencies declared in this section are defined in the dependencies section of the package.json file. Function dependencies include Actions on Google, Firebase Functions, Winston, and Request (gist).

Intent Handlers

The intent handlers in this section correspond to the intents in the Dialogflow console. Each handler responds with a SimpleResponse, BasicCard, and Suggestion Chip response types, or Simple Response, List, and Suggestion Chip response types. These response types were covered in part one of this post. (gist).

The Welcome Intent handler handles explicit invocations of our Action. The Fallback Intent handler handles both help requests, as well as cases when Dialogflow is unable to handle the user’s request.

As described above in the Dialogflow section, the Find Post Intent handler is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a single post about a topic. For example, ‘Find a post about Docker’. To fulfill the user request, the Find Post Intent handler, calls the Helper module’s getPostByTopic function, passing the topic requested and specifying a result set size of one post with the highest relevance score higher than an arbitrary value of 1.0.

Similarly, the Find Multiple Posts Intent handler is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a list of posts about a topic; for example, ‘I’m interested in Docker’. To fulfill the user request, the Find Multiple Posts Intent handler, calls the Helper module’s getPostsByTopic function, passing the topic requested and specifying a result set size of a maximum of six posts with the highest relevance scores greater than 1.0

The Find By ID Intent handler is responsible for handling our user’s requests for a specific, unique posts ID; for example, ‘Post ID 22141’. To fulfill the user request, the Find By ID Intent handler, calls the Helper module’s getPostById function, passing the unique Post ID (gist).

Entry Point

The entry point creates a way to handle the communication with Dialogflow’s fulfillment API (gist).

Helper Functions

The helper functions are part of the Helper module, contained in the helper.js file. In addition to typical utility functions like formatting dates, there are two functions, which interface with Elasticsearch, via our Spring Boot API, getPostsByTopic and getPostById. As described above, the intent handlers call one of these functions to obtain search results from Elasticsearch.

The getPostsByTopic function handles both the Find Post Intent handler and Find Multiple Posts Intent handler, described above. The only difference in the two calls is the size of the response set, either one result or six results maximum (gist).

Both functions use the request and request-promise-native npm modules to call the Spring Boot service’s RESTful API over HTTP. However, instead of returning a callback, the request-promise-native module allows us to return a native ES6 Promise. By returning a promise, we can use async/await with our Intent handlers. Using async/await with Promises is a newer way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js. The asynchronous programming model, using promises, is described in greater detail in my previous post, Building Serverless Actions for Google Assistant with Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage.

ThegetPostById function handles both the Find By ID Intent handler and Option Intent handler, described above. This function is similar to the getPostsByTopic function, calling a Spring Boot service’s RESTful API endpoint and passing the Post ID (gist).

Cloud Function Deployment

To deploy the Cloud Function to GCP, use the gcloud CLI with the beta version of the functions deploy command. According to Google, gcloud is a part of the Google Cloud SDK. You must download and install the SDK on your system and initialize it before you can use gcloud. Currently, Cloud Functions are only available in four regions. I have included a shell script, deploy-cloud-function.sh, to make this step easier. It is called using the npm run deploy function. (gist).

The creation or update of the Cloud Function can take up to two minutes. Note the output indicates the environment variables, contained in the .env.yaml file, have been deployed. The URL endpoint of the function and the function’s entry point are also both output.

If you recall, the URL endpoint of the Cloud Function is required in the Dialogflow Fulfillment tab. The URL can be retrieved from the deployment output (shown above). The Cloud Function is now deployed and will be called by the Action when a user invokes the Action.

What is Deployed

The .gcloudignore file is created the first time you deploy a new function. Using the the .gcloudignore file, you limit the files deployed to GCP. For this post, of all the files in the project, only four files, index.js, helper.js, package.js, and the PNG file used in the Action’s responses, need to be deployed. All other project files are ear-marked in the .gcloudignore file to avoid being deployed.

Simulation Testing and Debugging

With our Action and all its dependencies deployed and configured, we can test the Action using the Simulation console on Actions on Google. According to Google, the Action Simulation console allows us to manually test our Action by simulating a variety of Google-enabled hardware devices and their settings.

Below, in the Simulation console, we see the successful display of our Programmatic Ponderings Search Action for Google Assistant containing the expected Simple Response, List, and Suggestion Chips response types, triggered by a user’s invocation of the Action.

The simulated response indicates that the Google Cloud Function was called, and it responded successfully. That also indicates the Dialogflow-based Action successfully communicated with the Cloud Function, the Cloud Function successfully communicated with the Spring Boot service instances running on Google Kubernetes Engine, and finally, the Spring Boot services successfully communicated with Elasticsearch running on Google Compute Engine.

If we had issues with the testing, the Action Simulation console also contains tabs containing the request and response objects sent to and from the Cloud Function, the audio response, a debug console, any errors, and access to the logs.

Stackdriver Logging

In the log output below, from our Cloud Function, we see our Cloud Function’s activities. These activities including information log entries, which we explicitly defined in our Cloud Function using the winston and @google-cloud/logging-winston npm modules. According to Google, the author of the module, Stackdriver Logging for Winston provides an easy to use, higher-level layer (transport) for working with Stackdriver Logging, compatible with Winston. Developing an effective logging strategy is essential to maintaining and troubleshooting your code in Development, as well as Production.

Conclusion

In this two-part post, we observed how the capabilities of a voice and text-based conversational interface, such as an Action for Google Assistant, may be enhanced through integration with a search and analytics engine, such as Elasticsearch. This post barely scraped the surface of what could be achieved with such an integration. Elasticsearch, as well as other leading Lucene-based search and analytics engines, such as Apache Solr, have tremendous capabilities, which are easily integrated to machine learning-based conversational interfaces, resulting in a more powerful and a more intuitive end-user experience.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients, or Google.

Actions for Google Assistant, Cloud Function, Dialogflow, docker, Elasticsearch, GCP, GKE, Google Assistant, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Serverless, Spring Boot, Spring Data Elasticsearch, WordPress

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Integrating Search Capabilities with Actions for Google Assistant, using GKE and Elasticsearch: Part 1

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Cloud, GCP, Java Development, JavaScript, Serverless, Software Development on September 20, 2018

Introduction

Action Preview

Here is a brief YouTube video preview of the final Action for Google Assistant, integrated with Elasticsearch, running on an Apple iPhone.

Google Technologies

The high-level architecture of our search engine-enhanced Action for Google Assistant will look as follows.

Here is a brief overview of the key technologies we will incorporate into our architecture.

Actions on Google

According to Google, Actions on Google is the platform for developers to extend the Google Assistant. Actions on Google is a web-based platform that provides a streamlined user-experience to create, manage, and deploy Actions. We will use the Actions on Google platform to develop our Action in this post.

Dialogflow

According to Google, Dialogflow is an enterprise-grade NLU platform that makes it easy for developers to design and integrate conversational user interfaces into mobile apps, web applications, devices, and bots. Dialogflow is powered by Google’s machine learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions are part of Google’s event-driven, serverless compute platform, part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google Cloud Functions are analogous to Amazon’s AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Features include automatic scaling, high availability, fault tolerance, no servers to provision, manage, patch or update, and a payment model based on the function’s execution time.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment, available on GCP, for deploying containerized applications. According to Google, Kubernetes Engine is a reliable, efficient, and secure way to run Kubernetes clusters in the Cloud.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a leading, distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch is a product of Elastic, the company behind the Elastic Stack, which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, X-Pack, and Elastic Cloud. Elasticsearch provides a distributed, multitenant-capable, full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is similar to Apache Solr in terms of features and functionality. Both Solr and Elasticsearch is based on Apache Lucene.

Other Technologies

In addition to the major technologies highlighted above, the project also relies on the following:

Google Container Registry – As an alternative to Docker Hub, we will store the Spring Boot API service’s Docker Image in Google Container Registry, making deployment to GKE a breeze.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager – Google Cloud Deployment Manager allows users to specify all the resources needed for application in a declarative format using YAML. The Elastic Stack will be deployed with Deployment Manager.
Google Compute Engine – Google Compute Engine delivers scalable, high-performance virtual machines (VMs) running in Google’s data centers, on their worldwide fiber network.
Google Stackdriver – Stackdriver aggregates metrics, logs, and events from our Cloud-based project infrastructure, for troubleshooting. We are also integrating Stackdriver Logging for Winston into our Cloud Function for fast application feedback.
Google Cloud DNS – Hosts the primary project domain and subdomains for the search engine and API. Google Cloud DNS is a scalable, reliable and managed authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google.
Google VPC Network Firewall – Firewall rules provide fine-grain, secure access controls to our API and search engine. We will several firewall port openings to talk to the Elastic Stack.
Spring Boot – Pivotal’s Spring Boot project makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Java applications, such as our Spring Boot service.
Spring Data Elasticsearch – Pivotal Software’s Spring Data Elasticsearch project provides easy integration to Elasticsearch from our Java-based Spring Boot service.

Demonstration

To demonstrate an Action for Google Assistant with search engine integration, we need an index of content to search. In this post, we will build an informational Action, the Programmatic Ponderings Search Action, that responds to a user’s interests in certain technical topics, by returning post suggestions from the Programmatic Ponderings blog. For this demonstration, I have indexed the last two years worth of blog posts into Elasticsearch, using the ElasticPress WordPress plugin.

Source Code

Development Process

This post will focus on the development and integration of the Action for Google Assistant with Elasticsearch, via a Google Cloud Function, Kubernetes Engine, and the Spring Boot API service. The post is not intended to be a general how-to on developing for Actions for Google Assistant, Google Cloud Platform, Elasticsearch, or WordPress.

Building and integrating the Action will involve the following steps:

Design the Action’s conversation model;
Provision the Elastic Stack on Google Compute Engine using Deployment Manager;
Create an Elasticsearch index of blog posts;
Provision the Kubernetes cluster on GCP with GKE;
Develop and deploy the Spring Boot API service to Kubernetes;

Covered in Part Two of the Post:

Create the new Actions project using the Actions on Google;
Develop the Action’s Intents using the Dialogflow;
Develop, deploy, and test the Cloud Function to GCP;

Let’s explore each step in more detail.

Conversational Model

The conversational model design of the Programmatic Ponderings Search Action for Google Assistant will have the option to invoke the Action in two ways, with or without intent. Below on the left, we see an example of an invocation of the Action – ‘Talk to Programmatic Ponderings’. Google Assistant then responds to the user for more information (intent) – ‘What topic are you interested in reading about?’.

Below on the left, we see an invocation of the Action, which includes the intent – ‘Ask Programmatic Ponderings to find a post about Kubernetes’. Google Assistant will respond directly, both verbally and visually with the most relevant post.

When a user requests a single result, for example, ‘Find a post about Docker’, Google Assistant will include Simple Response, Basic Card, and Suggestion Chip response types for devices with a display. This is shown in the center, above. The user may continue to ask for additional facts or choose to cancel the Action at any time.

When a user requests multiple results, for example, ‘I’m interested in Docker’, Google Assistant will include Simple Response, List, and Suggestion Chip response types for devices with a display. An example of a List Response is shown in the center of the previous set of screengrabs, above. The user will receive up to six results in the list, with a relevance score of 1.0 or greater. The user may choose to click on any of the post results in the list, which will initiate a new search using the post’s unique ID, as shown on the right, in the first set of screengrabs, above.

The conversational model also understands a request for help and to cancel the interaction.

GCP Account and Project

The following steps assume you have an existing GCP account and you have created a project on GCP to house the Cloud Function, GKE Cluster, and Elastic Stack on Google Compute Engine. The post also assumes that you have the latest Google Cloud SDK installed on your development machine, and have authenticated your identity from the command line (gist).

Elasticsearch on GCP

There are a number of options available to host Elasticsearch. Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, offers the Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed, scalable, and reliable service on AWS and GCP. AWS also offers their own managed Elasticsearch Service. I found some limitations with AWS’ Elasticsearch Service, which made integration with Spring Data Elasticsearch difficult. According to AWS, the service supports HTTP but does not support TCP transport.

For this post, we will stand up the Elastic Stack on GCP using an offering from the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. A well-known provider of packaged applications for multiple Cloud platforms, Bitnami, offers the ELK Stack (the previous name for the Elastic Stack), running on Google Compute Engine.

GCP Marketplace Solutions are deployed using the Google Cloud Deployment Manager. The Bitnami ELK solution is a complete stack with all the necessary software and software-defined Cloud infrastructure to securely run Elasticsearch. You select the instance’s zone(s), machine type, boot disk size, and security and networking configurations. Using that configuration, the Deployment Manager will deploy the solution and provide you with information and credentials for accessing the Elastic Stack. For this demo, we will configure a minimally-sized, single VM instance to run the Elastic Stack.

Below we see the Bitnami ELK stack’s components being created on GCP, by the Deployment Manager.

Indexed Content

With the Elastic Stack fully provisioned, I then configured WordPress to index the last two years of the Programmatic Pondering blog posts to Elasticsearch on GCP. If you want to follow along with this post and content to index, there is plenty of open source and public domain indexable content available on the Internet – books, movie lists, government and weather data, online catalogs of products, and so forth. Anything in a document database is directly indexable in Elasticsearch. Elastic even provides a set of index samples, available on their GitHub site.

Firewall Ports for Elasticseach

The Deployment Manager opens up firewall ports 80 and 443. To index the WordPress posts, I also had to open port 9200. According to Elastic, Elasticsearch uses port 9200 for communicating with their RESTful API with JSON over HTTP. For security, I locked down this firewall opening to my WordPress server’s address as the source. (gist).

The two existing firewall rules for port opening 80 and 443 should also be locked down to your own IP address as the source. Common Elasticsearch ports are constantly scanned by Hackers, who will quickly hijack your Elasticsearch contents and hold them for ransom, in addition to deleting your indexes. Similar tactics are used on well-known and unprotected ports for many platforms, including Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Kibana

Once the posts are indexed, the best way to view the resulting Elasticsearch documents is through Kibana, which is included as part of the Bitnami solution. Below we see approximately thirty posts, spread out across two years.

Each Elasticsearch document, representing an indexed WordPress blog post, contains over 125 fields of information. Fields include a unique post ID, post title, content, publish date, excerpt, author, URL, and so forth. All these fields are exposed through Elasticsearch’s API, and as we will see, will be available to our Spring Boot service to query.

Spring Boot Service

To ensure decoupling between the Action for Google Assistant and Elasticsearch, we will expose a RESTful search API, written in Java using Spring Boot and Spring Data Elasticsearch. The API will expose a tailored set of flexible endpoints to the Action. Google’s machine learning services will ensure our conversational model is trained to understand user intent. The API’s query algorithm and Elasticsearch’s rich Lucene-based search features will ensure the most relevant results are returned. We will host the Spring Boot service on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Will use a Spring Rest Controller to expose our RESTful web service’s resources to our Action’s Cloud Function. The current Spring Boot service contains five /elastic resource endpoints exposed by the ElasticsearchPostController class . Of those five, two endpoints will be called by our Action in this demo, the /{id} and the /dismax-search endpoints. The endpoints can be seen using the Swagger UI. Our Spring Boot service implements SpringFox, which has the option to expose the Swagger interactive API UI.

The /{id} endpoint accepts a unique post ID as a path variable in the API call and returns a single ElasticsearchPost object wrapped in a Map object, and serialized to a JSON payload (gist).

Below we see an example response from the Spring Boot service to an API call to the /{id} endpoint, for post ID 22141. Since we are returning a single post, based on ID, the relevance score will always be 0.0 (gist).

This controller’s /{id} endpoint relies on a method exposed by the ElasticsearchPostRepository interface. The ElasticsearchPostRepository is a Spring Data Repository , which extends ElasticsearchRepository. The repository exposes the findById() method, which returns a single instance of the type, ElasticsearchPost, from Elasticsearch (gist).

The ElasticsearchPost class is annotated as an Elasticsearch Document, similar to other Spring Data Document annotations, such as Spring Data MongoDB. The ElasticsearchPost class is instantiated to hold deserialized JSON documents stored in ElasticSeach stores indexed data (gist).

Dis Max Query

The second API endpoint called by our Action is the /dismax-search endpoint. We use this endpoint to search for a particular post topic, such as ’Docker’. This type of search, as opposed to the Spring Data Repository method used by the /{id} endpoint, requires the use of an ElasticsearchTemplate. The ElasticsearchTemplate allows us to form more complex Elasticsearch queries than is possible using an ElasticsearchRepository class. Below, the /dismax-search endpoint accepts four input request parameters in the API call, which are the topic to search for, the starting point and size of the response to return, and the minimum relevance score (gist).

The logic to create and execute the ElasticsearchTemplate is handled by the ElasticsearchService class. The ElasticsearchPostController calls the ElasticsearchService. The ElasticsearchService handles querying Elasticsearch and returning a list of ElasticsearchPost objects to the ElasticsearchPostController. The dismaxSearch method, called by the /dismax-search endpoint’s method constructs the ElasticsearchTemplate instance, used to build the request to Elasticsearch’s RESTful API (gist).

To obtain the most relevant search results, we will use Elasticsearch’s Dis Max Query combined with the Match Phrase Query. Elastic describes the Dis Max Query as:

‘a query that generates the union of documents produced by its subqueries, and that scores each document with the maximum score for that document as produced by any subquery, plus a tie breaking increment for any additional matching subqueries.’

In short, the Dis Max Query allows us to query and weight (boost importance) multiple indexed fields, across all documents. The Match Phrase Query analyzes the text (our topic) and creates a phrase query out of the analyzed text.

After some experimentation, I found the valid search results were returned by applying greater weighting (boost) to the post’s title and excerpt, followed by the post’s tags and categories, and finally, the actual text of the post. I also limited results to a minimum score of 1.0. Just because a word or phrase is repeated in a post, doesn’t mean it is indicative of the post’s subject matter. Setting a minimum score attempts to help ensure the requested topic is featured more prominently in the resulting post or posts. Increasing the minimum score will decrease the number of search results, but theoretically, increase their relevance (gist).

Below we see the results of a /dismax-search API call to our service, querying for posts about the topic, ’Istio’, with a minimum score of 2.0. The search resulted in a serialized JSON payload containing three ElasticsearchPost objects (gist).

Understanding Relevance Scoring

When returning search results, such as in the example above, the top result is the one with the highest score. The highest score should denote the most relevant result to the search query. According to Elastic, in their document titled, The Theory Behind Relevance Scoring, scoring is explained this way:

‘Lucene (and thus Elasticsearch) uses the Boolean model to find matching documents, and a formula called the practical scoring function to calculate relevance. This formula borrows concepts from term frequency/inverse document frequency and the vector space model but adds more-modern features like a coordination factor, field length normalization, and term or query clause boosting.’

In order to better understand this technical explanation of relevance scoring, it is much easy to see it applied to our example. Note the first search result above, Post ID 21867, has the highest score, 5.91989. Knowing that we are searching five fields (title, excerpt, tags, categories, and content), and boosting certain fields more than others, how was this score determined? Conveniently, Spring Data Elasticsearch’s SearchRequestBuilder class exposed the setExplain method. We can see this on line 12 of the dimaxQuery method, shown above. By passing a boolean value of true to the setExplain method, we are able to see the detailed scoring algorithms used by Elasticsearch for the top result, shown above (gist).

What this detail shows us is that of the five fields searched, the term ‘Istio’ was located in four of the five fields (all except ‘categories’). Using the practical scoring function described by Elasticsearch, and taking into account our boost values, we see that the post’s ‘excerpt’ field achieved the highest score of 5.9198895 (score of 1.6739764 * boost of 3.0).

Being able to view the scoring explanation helps us tune our search results. For example, according to the details, the term ‘Istio’ appeared 100 times (termFreq=100.0) in the main body of the post (the ‘content’ field). We might ask ourselves if we are giving enough relevance to the content as opposed to other fields. We might choose to increase the boost or decrease other fields with respect to the ‘content’ field, to produce higher quality search results.

Google Kubernetes Engine

With the Elastic Stack running on Google Compute Engine, and the Spring Boot API service built, we can now provision a Kubernetes cluster to run our Spring Boot service. The service will sit between our Action’s Cloud Function and Elasticsearch. We will use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to manage our Kubernete cluster on GCP. A GKE cluster is a managed group of uniform VM instances for running Kubernetes. The VMs are managed by Google Compute Engine. Google Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Google’s data centers, on their worldwide fiber network.

A GKE cluster can be provisioned using GCP’s Cloud Console or using the Cloud SDK, Google’s command-line interface for Google Cloud Platform products and services. I prefer using the CLI, which helps enable DevOps automation through tools like Jenkins and Travis CI (gist).

Below is the command I used to provision a minimally sized three-node GKE cluster, replete with the latest available version of Kubernetes. Although a one-node cluster is sufficient for early-stage development, testing should be done on a multi-node cluster to ensure the service will operate properly with multiple instances running behind a load-balancer (gist).

Below, we see the three n1-standard-1 instance type worker nodes, one in each of three different specific geographical locations, referred to as zones. The three zones are in the us-east1 region. Multiple instances spread across multiple zones provide single-region high-availability for our Spring Boot service. With GKE, the Master Node is fully managed by Google.

Building Service Image

In order to deploy our Spring Boot service, we must first build a Docker Image and make that image available to our Kubernetes cluster. For lowest latency, I’ve chosen to build and publish the image to Google Container Registry, in addition to Docker Hub. The Spring Boot service’s Docker image is built on the latest Debian-based OpenJDK 10 Slim base image, available on Docker Hub. The Spring Boot JAR file is copied into the image (gist).

To automate the build and publish processes with tools such as Jenkins or Travis CI, we will use a simple shell script. The script builds the Spring Boot service using Gradle, then builds the Docker Image containing the Spring Boot JAR file, tags and publishes the Docker image to the image repository, and finally, redeploys the Spring Boot service container to GKE using kubectl (gist).

Below we see the latest version of our Spring Boot Docker image published to the Google Cloud Registry.

Deploying the Service

To deploy the Spring Boot service’s container to GKE, we will use a Kubernetes Deployment Controller. The Deployment Controller manages the Pods and ReplicaSets. As a deployment alternative, you could choose to use CoreOS’ Operator Framework to create an Operator or use Helm to create a Helm Chart. Along with the Deployment Controller, there is a ConfigMap and a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. The ConfigMap contains environment variables that will be available to the Spring Boot service instances running in the Kubernetes Pods. Variables include the host and port of the Elasticsearch cluster on GCP and the name of the Elasticsearch index created by WordPress. These values will override any configuration values set in the service’s application.yml Java properties file.

The Deployment Controller creates a ReplicaSet with three Pods, running the Spring Boot service, one on each worker node (gist).

To properly load-balance the three Spring Boot service Pods, we will also deploy a Kubernetes Service of the Kubernetes ServiceType, LoadBalancer. According to Kubernetes, a Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them (gist).

Below, we see three instances of the Spring Boot service deployed to the GKE cluster on GCP. Each Pod, containing an instance of the Spring Boot service, is in a load-balanced pool, behind our service load balancer, and exposed on port 80.

Testing the API

We can test our API and ensure it is talking to Elasticsearch, and returning expected results using the Swagger UI, shown previously, or tools like Postman, shown below.

Communication Between GKE and Elasticsearch

Similar to port 9200, which needed to be opened for indexing content over HTTP, we also need to open firewall port 9300 between the Spring Boot service on GKE and Elasticsearch. According to Elastic, Elasticsearch Java clients talk to the Elasticsearch cluster over port 9300, using the native Elasticsearch transport protocol (TCP).

Again, locking this port down to the GKE cluster as the source is critical for security (gist).

Part Two

In part one we have examined the creation of the Elastic Stack, the provisioning of the GKE cluster, and the development and deployment of the Spring Boot service to Kubernetes. In part two of this post, we will tie everything together by creating and integrating our Action for Google Assistant:

Create the new Actions project using the Actions on Google console;
Develop the Action’s Intents using the Dialogflow console;
Develop, deploy, and test the Cloud Function to GCP;

If you’re interested in comparing the development of an Action for Google Assistant with that of Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s LUIS-enabled chatbots, in addition to this post, I would recommend the previous three posts in this conversation interface series:

All three article’s demonstrations leverage their respective Cloud platform’s machine learning-based Natural language understanding (NLU) services. All three take advantage of their respective Cloud platform’s NoSQL database and object storage services. Lastly, all three of the article’s demonstrations are written in a common language, Node.js.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients, or Google.

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Building and Integrating LUIS-enabled Chatbots with Slack, using Azure Bot Service, Bot Builder SDK, and Cosmos DB

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Azure, Cloud, Continuous Delivery, JavaScript, Software Development on August 27, 2018

Introduction

In this post, we will explore the development of a machine learning-based LUIS-enabled chatbot using the Azure Bot Service and the BotBuilder SDK. We will enhance the chatbot’s functionality with Azure’s Cloud services, including Cosmos DB and Blob Storage. Once built, we will integrate our chatbot across multiple channels, including Web Chat and Slack.

If you want to compare Azure’s current chatbot technologies with those of AWS and Google, in addition to this post, please read my previous two posts in this series, Building Serverless Actions for Google Assistant with Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage and Building Asynchronous, Serverless Alexa Skills with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and Node.js. All three of the article’s demonstrations are written in Node.js, all three leverage their cloud platform’s machine learning-based Natural Language Understanding services, and all three take advantage of NoSQL database and storage services available on their respective cloud platforms.

Technology Stack

Here is a brief overview of the key Microsoft technologies we will incorporate into our bot’s architecture.

LUIS

The machine learning-based Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) is part of Azure’s Cognitive Services, used to build Natural Language Understanding (NLU) into apps, bots, and IoT devices. According to Microsoft, LUIS allows you to quickly create enterprise-ready, custom machine learning models that continuously improve.

Designed to identify valuable information in conversations, Language Understanding interprets user goals (intents) and distills valuable information from sentences (entities), for a high quality, nuanced language model. Language Understanding integrates seamlessly with the Speech service for instant Speech-to-Intent processing, and with the Azure Bot Service, making it easy to create a sophisticated bot. A LUIS bot contains a domain-specific natural language model, which you design.

Azure Bot Service

The Azure Bot Service provides an integrated environment that is purpose-built for bot development, enabling you to build, connect, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots, all from one place. Bot Service leverages the Bot Builder SDK.

Bot Builder SDK

The Bot Builder SDK allows you to build, connect, deploy and manage bots, which interact with users, across multiple channels, from your app or website to Facebook, Messenger, Kik, Skype, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, SMS, Twilio, Cortana, and Skype. Currently, the SDK is available for C# and Node.js. For this post, we will use the current Bot Builder Node.js SDK v3 release to write our chatbot.

Cosmos DB

According to Microsoft, Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database-as-a-service, designed for low latency and scalable applications anywhere in the world. Cosmos DB supports multiple data models, including document, columnar, and graph. Cosmos also supports numerous database SDKs, including MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin DB. We will use the MongoDB SDK to store our documents in Cosmos DB, used by our chatbot.

Azure Blob Storage

According to Microsoft, Azure’s storage-as-a-service, Blob Storage, provides massively scalable object storage for any type of unstructured data, images, videos, audio, documents, and more. We will be using Blob Storage to store publically-accessible images, used by our chatbot.

Azure Application Insights

According to Microsoft, Azure’s Application Insights provides comprehensive, actionable insights through application performance management (APM) and instant analytics. Quickly analyze application telemetry, allowing the detection of anomalies, application failure, performance changes. Application Insights will enable us to monitor our chatbot’s key metrics.

High-Level Architecture

A chatbot user interacts with the chatbot through a number of available channels, such as the Web, Slack, and Skype. The channels communicate with the Web App Bot, part of Azure Bot Service, and running on Azure’s App Service, the fully-managed platform for cloud apps. LUIS integration allows the chatbot to learn and understand the user’s intent based on our own domain-specific natural language model.

Through Azure’s App Service platform, our chatbot is able to retrieve data from Cosmos DB and images from Blob Storage. Our chatbot’s telemetry is available through Azure’s Application Insights.

Azure Resources

Another way to understand our chatbot architecture is by examining the Azure resources necessary to build the chatbot. Below is an example of all the Azure resources that will be created as a result of building a LUIS-enabled bot, which has been integrated with Cosmos DB, Blob Storage, and Application Insights.

Chatbot Demonstration

As a demonstration, we will build an informational chatbot, the Azure Tech Facts Chatbot. The bot will respond to the user with interesting facts about Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud computing platform. Note this is not intended to be an official Microsoft bot and is only used for demonstration purposes.

Source Code

All open-sourced code for this post can be found on GitHub. The code samples in this post are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to the gists are also provided.

Development Process

This post will focus on the development and integration of a chatbot with the LUIS, Azure platform services, and channels, such as Web Chat and Slack. The post is not intended to be a general how-to article on developing Azure chatbots or the use of the Azure Cloud Platform.

Building the chatbot will involve the following steps.

Design the chatbot’s conversation flow;
Provision a Cosmos DB instance and import the Azure Facts documents;
Provision Azure Storage and upload the images as blobs into Azure Storage;
Create the new LUIS-enabled Web App Bot with Azure’s Bot Service;
Define the chatbot’s Intents, Entities, and Utterances with LUIS;
Train and publish the LUIS app;
Deploy and test the chatbot;
Integrate the chatbot with Web Chat and Slack Channels;

The post assumes you have an existing Azure account and a working knowledge of Azure. Let’s explore each step in more detail.

Cost of Azure Bots!

Be aware, you will be charged for Azure Cloud services when building this bot. Unlike an Alexa Custom Skill or an Action for Google Assistant, an Azure chatbot is not a serverless application. A common feature of serverless platforms, you only pay for the compute time you consume. There typically is no charge when your code is not running. This means, unlike AWS and Google Cloud Platform, you will pay for Azure resources you provision, whether or not you use them.

Developing this demo’s chatbot on the Azure platform, with little or no activity most of the time, cost me about $5/day. On AWS or GCP, a similar project would cost pennies per day or less (like, $0). Currently, in my opinion, Azure does not have a very competitive model for building bots, or for serverless computing in general, beyond Azure Functions, when compared to Google and AWS.

Conversational Flow

The first step in developing a chatbot is designing the conversation flow of the between the user and the bot. Defining the conversation flow is essential to developing the bot’s programmatic logic and training the domain-specific natural language model for the machine learning-based services the bot is integrated with, in this case, LUIS. What are all the ways the user might explicitly invoke our chatbot? What are all the ways the user might implicitly invoke our chatbot and provide intent to the bot? Taking the time to map out the possible conversational interactions is essential.

With more advanced bots, like Alexa, Actions for Google Assistant, and Azure Bots, we also have to consider the visual design of the conversational interfaces. In addition to simple voice and text responses, these bots are capable of responding with a rich array of UX elements, including what are generically known as ‘Cards’. Cards come in varying complexity and may contain elements such as text, title, sub-titles, text, video, audio, buttons, and links. Azure Bot Service offers several different cards for specific use cases.

Channel Design

Another layer of complexity with bots is designing for channels into which they integrate. There is a substantial visual difference in a conversational exchange displayed on Facebook Messanger, as compared to Slack, or Skype, Microsoft Teams, GroupMe, or within a web browser. Producing an effective conversational flow presentation across multiple channels a design challenge.

We will be focusing on two channels for delivery of our bot, the Web Chat and Slack channels. We will want to design the conversational flow and visual elements to be effective and engaging across both channels. The added complexity with both channels, they both have mobile and web-based interfaces. We will ensure our design works with the compact real-estate of an average-sized mobile device screen, as well as average-sized laptop’s screen.

Web Chat Channel Design

Below are two views of our chatbot, delivered through the Web Chat channel. To the left, is an example of the bot responding with ThumbnailCard UX elements. The ThumbnailCards contain a title, sub-title, text, small image, and a button with a link. Below and to the right is an example of the bot responding with a HeroCard. The HeroCard contains the same elements as the ThumbnailCard but takes up about twice the space with a significantly larger image.

Slack Channel Design

Below are three views of our chatbot, delivered through the Slack channel, in this case, the mobile iOS version of the Slack app. Even here on a larger iPhone 8s, there is not a lot of real estate. On the right is the same HeroCard as we saw above in the Web Chat channel. In the middle are the same ThumbnailCards. On the right is a simple text-only response. Although the text-only bot responses are not as rich as the cards, you are able to display more of the conversational flow on a single mobile screen.

Lastly, below we see our chatbot delivered through the Slack for Mac desktop app. Within the single view, we see an example of a HeroCard (top), ThumbnailCard (center), and a text-only response (bottom). Notice how the larger UI of the desktop Slack app changes the look and feel of the chatbot conversational flow.

In my opinion, the ThumbnailCards work well in the Web Chat channel and Slack channel’s desktop app, while the text-only responses seem to work best with the smaller footprint of the Slack channel’s mobile client. To work across a number of channels, our final bot will contain a mix of ThumbnailCards and text-only responses.

Cosmos DB

As an alternative to Microsoft’s Cognitive Service, QnA Maker, we will use Cosmos DB to house the responses to user’s requests for facts about Azure. When a user asks our informational chatbot for a fact about Azure, the bot will query Cosmos DB, passing a single unique string value, the fact the user is requesting. In response, Cosmos DB will return a JSON Document, containing field-and-value pairs with the fact’s title, image name, and textual information, as shown below.

There are a few ways to create the new Cosmos DB database and collection, which will hold our documents, we will use the Azure CLI. According to Microsoft, the Azure CLI 2.0 is Microsoft’s cross-platform command line interface (CLI) for managing Azure resources. You can use it in your browser with Azure Cloud Shell, or install it on macOS, Linux, or Windows, and run it from the command line. (gist).

There are a few ways for us to get our Azure facts documents into Cosmos DB. Since we are writing our chatbot in Node.js, I also chose to write a Cosmos DB facts import script in Node.js, cosmos-db-data.js. Since we are using Cosmos DB as a MongoDB datastore, all the script requires is the official MongoDB driver for Node.js. Using the MongoDB driver’s db.collection.insertMany() method, we can upload an entire array of Azure fact document objects with one call. For security, we have set the Cosmos DB connection string as an environment variable, which the script expects to find at runtime (gist).

Azure Blob Storage

When a user asks our informational chatbot for a fact about Azure, the bot will query Cosmos DB. One of the values returned is an image name. The image itself is stored on Azure Blob Storage.

The image, actually an Azure icon available from Microsoft, is then displayed in the ThumbnailCard or HeroCard shown earlier.

According to Microsoft, an Azure storage account provides a unique namespace in the cloud to store and access your data objects in Azure Storage. A storage account contains any blobs, files, queues, tables, and disks that you create under that account. A container organizes a set of blobs, similar to a folder in a file system. All blobs reside within a container. Similar to Cosmos DB, there are a few ways to create a new Azure Storage account and a blob storage container, which will hold our images. Once again, we will use the Azure CLI (gist).

Once the storage account and container are created using the Azure CLI, to upload the images, included with the GitHub project, by using the Azure CLI’s storage blob upload-batch command (gist).

Web App Chatbot

To create the LUIS-enabled chatbot, we can use the Azure Bot Service, available on the Azure Portal. A Web App Bot is one of a variety of bots available from Azure’s Bot Service, which is part of Azure’s larger and quickly growing suite of AI and Machine Learning Cognitive Services. A Web App Bot is an Azure Bot Service Bot deployed to an Azure App Service Web App. An App Service Web App is a fully managed platform that lets you build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web apps.

To create a LUIS-enabled chatbot, choose the Language Understanding Bot template, from the Node.js SDK Language options. This will provide a complete project and boilerplate bot template, written in Node.js, for you to start developing with. I chose to use the SDK v3, as v4 is still in preview and subject to change.

Azure Resource Manager

A great DevOps features of the Azure Platform is Azure’s ability to generate Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and the associated automation scripts in PowerShell, .NET, Ruby, and the CLI. This allows engineers to programmatically build and provision services on the Azure platform, without having to write the code themselves.

To build our chatbot, you can continue from the Azure Portal as I did, or download the ARM template and scripts, and run them locally. Once you have created the chatbot, you will have the option to download the source code as a ZIP file from the Bot Management Build console. I prefer to use the JetBrains WebStorm IDE to develop my Node.js-based bots, and GitHub to store my source code.

Application Settings

As part of developing the chatbot, you will need to add two additional application settings to the Azure App Service the chatbot is running within. The Cosmos DB connection string (COSMOS_DB_CONN_STR) and the URL of your blob storage container (ICON_STORAGE_URL) will both be referenced from within our bot, as an environment variable. You can manually add the key/value pairs from the Azure Portal (shown below), or programmatically.

The chatbot’s code, in the app.js file, is divided into three sections: Constants and Global Variables, Intent Handlers, and Helper Functions. Let’s look at each section and its functionality.

Constants

Below is the Constants used by the chatbot. I have preserved Azure’s boilerplate template comments in the app.js file. The comments are helpful in understanding the detailed inner-workings of the chatbot code (gist).

Notice that using the LUIS-enabled Language Understanding template, Azure has provisioned a LUIS.ai app and integrated it with our chatbot. More about LUIS, next.

Intent Handlers

The next part of our chatbot’s code handles intents. Our chatbot’s intents include Greeting, Help, Cancel, and AzureFacts. The Greeting intent handler defines how the bot handles greeting a new user when they make an explicit invocation of the chatbot (without intent). The Help intent handler defines how the chatbot handles a request for help. The Cancel intent handler defines how the bot handles a user’s desire to quit, or if an unknown error occurs with our bot. The AzureFact intent handler, handles implicit invocations of the chatbot (with intent), by returning the requested Azure fact. We will use LUIS to train the AzureFacts intent in the next part of this post.

Each intent handler can return a different type of response to the user. For this demo, we will have the Greeting, Help, and AzureFacts handlers return a ThumbnailCard, while the Cancel handler simply returns a text message (gist).

Helper Functions

The last part of our chatbot’s code are the helper functions the intent handlers call. The functions include a function to return a random fact if the user requests one, selectRandomFact(). There are two functions, which return a ThumbnailCard or a HeroCard, depending on the request, createHeroCard(session, botResponse) and createThumbnailCard(session, botResponse).

The buildFactResponse(factToQuery, callback) function is called by the AzureFacts intent handler. This function passes the fact from the user (i.e. certifications) and a callback to the findFact(factToQuery, callback) function. The findFact function handles calling Cosmos DB, using MongoDB Node.JS Driver’s db.collection().findOne method. The function also returns a callback (gist).

LUIS

We will use LUIS to add a perceived degree of intelligence to our chatbot, helping it understand the domain-specific natural language model of our bot. If you have built Alexa Skills or Actions for Google Assitant, LUIS apps work almost identically. The concepts of Intents, Intent Handlers, Entities, and Utterances are universal to all three platforms.

Intents are how LUIS determines what a user wants to do. LUIS will parse user utterances, understand the user’s intent, and pass that intent onto our chatbot, to be handled by the proper intent handler. The bot will then respond accordingly to that intent — with a greeting, with the requested fact, or by providing help.

Entities

LUIS describes an entity as being like a variable, used to capture and pass important information. We will start by defining our AzureFacts Intent’s Facts Entities. The Facts entities represent each type of fact a user might request. The requested fact is extracted from the user’s utterances and passed to the chatbot. LUIS allows us to import entities as JSON. I have included a set of Facts entities to import, in the azure-facts-entities.json file, within the project on GitHub (gist).

Each entity includes a primary canonical form, as well as possible synonyms the user may utter in their invocation. If the user utters a synonym, LUIS will understand the intent and pass the canonical form of the entity to the chatbot. For example, if we said ‘tell me about Azure AKS,’ LUIS understands the phrasing, identifies the correct intent, AzureFacts intent, substitutes the synonym, ‘AKS’, with the canonical form of the Facts entity, ‘kubernetes’, and passes the top scoring intent to be handled and the value ‘kubernetes’ to our bot. The bot would then query for the document associated with ‘kubernetes’ in Cosmos DB, and return a response.

Utterances

Once we have created and associated our Facts entities with our AzureFacts intent, we need to input a few possible phrases a user may utter to invoke our chatbot. Microsoft actually recommends not coding too many utterance examples, as part of their best practices. Below you see an elementary list of possible phrases associated with the AzureFacts intent. You also see the blue highlighted word, ‘Facts’ in each utterance, a reference to the Facts entities. LUIS understands that this position in the phrasing represents a Facts entity value.

Patterns

Patterns, according to Microsoft, are designed to improve the accuracy of LUIS, when several utterances are very similar. By providing a pattern for the utterances, LUIS can have higher confidence in the predictions.

The topic of training your LUIS app is well beyond the scope of this post. Microsoft has an excellent series of articles, I strongly suggest reading. They will greatly assist in improving the accuracy of your LUIS chatbot.

Once you have completed building and training your intents, entities, phrases, and other items, you must publish your LUIS app for it to be accessed from your chatbot. Publish allows LUIS to be queried from an HTTP endpoint. The LUIS interface will enable you to publish both a Staging and a Production copy of the app. For brevity, I published directly to Production. If you recall our chatbot’s application settings, earlier, the settings include a luisAppId, luisAppKey, and a luisAppIdHostName. Together these form the HTTP endpoint, LuisModelUrl, through which the chatbot will access the LUIS app.

Using the LUIS API endpoint, we can test our LUIS app, independent of our chatbot. This can be very useful for troubleshooting bot issues. Below, we see an example utterance of ‘tell me about Azure Functions.’ LUIS has correctly deduced the user intent, assigning the AzureFacts intent with the highest prediction score. LUIS also identified the correct Entity, ‘functions,’ which it would typically return to the chatbot.

Deployment

With our chatbot developed and our LUIS app built, trained, and published, we can deploy our bot to the Azure platform. There are a few ways to deploy our chatbot, depending on your platform and language choice. I chose to use the DevOps practice of Continuous Deployment, offered in the Azure Bot Management console.

With Continuous Deployment, every time we commit a change to GitHub, a webhook fires, and my chatbot is deployed to the Azure platform. If you have high confidence in your changes through testing, you could choose to commit and deploy directly.

Alternately, you might choose a safer approach, using feature branch or PR requests. In which case your chatbot will be deployed upon a successful merge of the feature branch or PR request to master.

Manual Testing

Azure provides the ability to test your bot, from the Azure portal. Using the Bot Management Test in Web Chat console, you can test your bot using the Web Chat channel. We will talk about different kinds of channel later in the post. This is an easy and quick way to manually test your chatbot.

For more sophisticated, automated testing of your chatbot, there are a handful of frameworks available, including bot-tester, which integrates with mocha and chai. Stuart Harrison published an excellent article on testing with the bot-tester framework, Building a test-driven chatbot for the Microsoft Bot Framework in Node.js.

Log Streaming

As part of testing and troubleshooting our chatbot in Production, we will need to review application logs occasionally. Azure offers their Log streaming feature. To access log streams, you must turn on application logging and chose a log level, in the Azure Monitoring Diagnostic logs console, which is off by default.

Once Application logging is active, you may review logs in the Monitoring Log stream console. Log streaming will automatically be turned off in 12 hours and times our after 30 minutes of inactivity. I personally find application logging and access to logs, more difficult and far less intuitive on the Azure platform, than on AWS or Google Cloud.

Metrics

As part of testing and eventually monitoring our chatbot in Production, the Azure App Service Overview console provides basic telemetry about the App Service, on which the bot is running. With Azure Application Insights, we can drill down into finer-grain application telemetry.

Web Integration

With our chatbot built, trained, deployed and tested, we can integrate it with multiple channels. Channels represent all how our users might interact with our chatbot, Web Chat, Slack, Skype, Facebook Messager, and so forth. Microsoft describes channels as a connection between the Bot Framework and communication apps. For this post, we will look at two channels, Web Chat and Slack.

Enabling Web Chat is probably the easiest of the channels. When you create a bot with Bot Service, the Web Chat channel is automatically configured for you. You used it to test your bot, earlier in the post. Displaying your chatbot through the Web Chat channel, embedded in your website, requires a secret, for which, you have two options. Option one is to keep your secret hidden, exchange your secret for a token, and generate the secret. Option two, according to Microsoft, is to embed the web chat control in your website using the secret. This method will allow other developers to easily embed your bot into their websites.

Embedding Web Chat in your website allows your website users to interact directly with your chatbot. Shown below, I have embedded our chatbot’s Web Chat channel in my website. It will enable a user to interact with the bot, independent of the website’s primary content. Here, a user could ask for more information on a particular topic they found of interest in the article, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The Web Chat window is collapsible when not in use.

The Web Chat is embedded using an HTML iframe tag. The HTML code to embed the Web Chat channel is included in the Web Chat Channel Configuration console, shown above. I found an effective piece of JavaScript code by Anthony Cu, in his post, Embed the Bot Framework Web Chat as a Collapsible Window. I modified Anthony’s code to fit my own website, moving the collapsable Web Chat iframe to the bottom right corner and adjusting the dimensions of the frame, as not to intrude on the site’s central content area. I’ve included the code and a simulated HTML page in the GitHub project.

Slack Integration

To integrate your chatbot with the Slack channel, I will assume you have an existing Slack Workspace with sufficient admin rights to create and deploy Slack Apps to that Workspace.

To integrate our chatbot with Slack, we need to create a new Bot App for Slack. The Slack App will be configured to interact with our deployed bot on Azure securely. Microsoft has an excellent set of easy-to-follow documentation on connecting a bot to Slack. I am only going to summarize the steps here.

Once your Slack App is created, the Slack App contains a set of credentials.

Those Slack App credentials are then shared with the chatbot, in the Azure Slack Channel integration console. This ensures secure communication between your chatbot and your Slack App.

Part of creating your Slack App, is configuring Event Subscriptions. The Microsoft documentation outlines six bot events that need to be configured. By subscribing to bot events, your app will be notified of user activities at the URL you specify.

You also configure a Bot User. Adding a Bot User allows you to assign a username for your bot and choose whether it is always shown as online. This is the username you will see within your Slack app.

Once the Slack App is built, credentials are exchanged, events are configured, and the Bot User is created, you finish by authorizing your Slack App to interact with users within your Slack Workspace. Below I am authorizing the Azure Tech Facts Bot Slack App to interact with users in my Programmatic Ponderings Slack Workspace.

Below we see the Azure Tech Facts Bot Slack App deployed to my Programmatic Ponderings Slack Workspace. The Slack App is shown in the Slack for Mac desktop app.

Similarly, we see the same Azure Tech Facts Bot Slack App being used in the Slack iOS App.

Conclusion

In this brief post, we saw how to develop a Machine learning-based LUIS-enabled chatbot using the Azure Bot Service and the BotBuilder SDK. We enhanced the bot’s functionality with two of Azure’s Cloud services, Cosmos DB and Blob Storage. Once built, we integrated our chatbot with the Web Chat and Slack channels.

This was a very simple demonstration of a LUIS chatbot. The true power of intelligent bots comes from further integrating bots with Azure AI and Machine Learning Services, such as Azure’s Cognitive Services. Additionally, Azure cloud platform offers other more traditional cloud services, in addition to Cosmos DB and Blob Storage, to extend the feature and functionally of bots, such as messaging, IoT, Azure serverless Functions, and AKS-based microservices.

Azure is a trademark of Microsoft
The image in the background of Azure icon copyright: kran77 / 123RF Stock Photo

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients, or Microsoft.

App Service, Azure, bot, Bot Builder, Bot Service, chatbot, Cosmos DB, Language Understanding Intelligent Service, LUIS, NLU

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Building Serverless Actions for Google Assistant with Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Cloud, GCP, JavaScript, Serverless, Software Development on August 11, 2018

Introduction

In this post, we will create an Action for Google Assistant using the ‘Actions on Google’ development platform, Google Cloud Platform’s serverless Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage, and the current LTS version of Node.js. According to Google, Actions are pieces of software, designed to extend the functionality of the Google Assistant, Google’s virtual personal assistant, across a multitude of Google-enabled devices, including smartphones, cars, televisions, headphones, watches, and smart-speakers.

Here is a brief YouTube video preview of the final Action for Google Assistant, we will explore in this post, running on an Apple iPhone 8.

If you want to compare the development of an Action for Google Assistant with those of AWS and Azure, in addition to this post, please read my previous two posts in this series, Building and Integrating LUIS-enabled Chatbots with Slack, using Azure Bot Service, Bot Builder SDK, and Cosmos DB and Building Asynchronous, Serverless Alexa Skills with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and Node.js. All three of the article’s demonstrations are written in Node.js, all three leverage their cloud platform’s machine learning-based Natural Language Understanding services, and all three take advantage of NoSQL database and storage services available on their respective cloud platforms.

Google Technologies

The final architecture of our Action for Google Assistant will look as follows.

Here is a brief overview of the key technologies we will incorporate into our architecture.

Actions on Google

According to Google, Actions on Google is the platform for developers to extend the Google Assistant. Similar to Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit Development Console for developing Alexa Skills, Actions on Google is a web-based platform that provides a streamlined user-experience to create, manage, and deploy Actions. We will use the Actions on Google platform to develop our Action in this post.

Dialogflow

According to Google, Dialogflow is an enterprise-grade Natural language understanding (NLU) platform that makes it easy for developers to design and integrate conversational user interfaces into mobile apps, web applications, devices, and bots. Dialogflow is powered by Google’s machine learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Dialogflow was initially known as API.AI prior being renamed by Google in late 2017.

We will use the Dialogflow web-based development platform and version 2 of the Dialogflow API, which became GA in April 2018, to build our Action for Google Assistant’s rich, natural-language conversational interface.

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions are the event-driven serverless compute platform, part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google Cloud Functions are comparable to Amazon’s AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Cloud Functions is a relatively new service from Google, released in beta in March 2017, and only recently becoming GA at Cloud Next ’18 (July 2018). The main features of Cloud Functions include automatic scaling, high availability, fault tolerance, no servers to provision, manage, patch or update, and a payment model based on the function’s execution time. The programmatic logic behind our Action for Google Assistant will be handled by a Cloud Function.

Node.js LTS

We will write our Action’s Google Cloud Function using the Node.js 8 runtime. Google just released the ability to write Google Cloud Functions in Node 8.11.1 and Python 3.7.0, at Cloud Next ’18 (July 2018). It is still considered beta functionality. Previously, you had to write your functions in Node version 6 (currently, 6.14.0).

Node 8, also known as Project Carbon, was the first Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node to support async/await with Promises. Async/await is the new way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js. We will make use of async/await and Promises within our Action’s Cloud Function.

Google Cloud Datastore

Google Cloud Datastore is a highly-scalable NoSQL database. Cloud Datastore is similar in features and capabilities to Azure Cosmos DB and Amazon DynamoDB. Datastore automatically handles sharding and replication and offers features like a RESTful interface, ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, and indexes. We will use Datastore to persist the information returned to the user from our Action for Google Assistant.

Google Cloud Storage

The last technology, Google Cloud Storage is secure and durable object storage, nearly identical to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Azure Blob Storage. We will store publicly accessible images in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which will be displayed in Google Assistant Basic Card responses.

Demonstration

To demonstrate Actions for Google Assistant, we will build an informational Action that responds to the user with interesting facts about Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud computing platform (Google talking about Azure, ironic). Note this is not intended to be an official Microsoft bot and is only used for demonstration purposes.

Source Code

All open-sourced code for this post can be found on GitHub. Note code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Development Process

This post will focus on the development and integration of an Action with Google Cloud Platform’s serverless and asynchronous Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage. The post is not intended to be a general how-to on developing and publishing Actions for Google Assistant, or how to specifically use services on the Google Cloud Platform.

Building the Action will involve the following steps.

Design the Action’s conversation model;
Import the Azure Facts Entities into Cloud Datastore on GCP;
Create and upload the images to Cloud Storage on GCP;
Create the new Actions on Google project using the Actions on Google console;
Develop the Action’s Intent using the Dialogflow console;
Bulk import the Action’s Entities using the Dialogflow console;
Configure the Dialogflow Actions on Google Integration;
Develop and deploy the Cloud Function to GCP;
Test the Action using Actions on Google Simulator;

Let’s explore each step in more detail.

Conversational Model

The conversational model design of the Azure Tech Facts Action for Google Assistant is similar to the Azure Tech Facts Alexa Custom Skill, detailed in my previous post. We will have the option to invoke the Action in two ways, without initial intent (Explicit Invocation) and with intent (Implicit Invocation), as shown below. On the left, we see an example of an explicit invocation of the Action. Google Assistant then queries the user for more information. On the right, an implicit invocation of the Action includes the intent, being the Azure fact they want to learn about. Google Assistant responds directly, both verbally and visually with the fact.

Each fact returned by Google Assistant will include a Simple Response, Basic Card and Suggestions response types for devices with a display, as shown below. The user may continue to ask for additional facts or choose to cancel the Action at any time.

Lastly, as part of the conversational model, we will include the option of asking for a random fact, as well as asking for help. Examples of both are shown below. Again, Google Assistant responds to the user, vocally and, optionally, visually, for display-enabled devices.

GCP Account and Project

The following steps assume you have an existing GCP account and you have created a project on GCP to house the Cloud Function, Cloud Storage Bucket, and Cloud Datastore Entities. The post also assumes that you have the Google Cloud SDK installed on your development machine, and have authenticated your identity from the command line (gist).

Google Cloud Storage

First, the images, actually Azure icons available from Microsoft, displayed in the responses shown above, are uploaded to a Google Storage Bucket. To handle these tasks, we will use the gsutil CLI to create, upload, and manage the images. The gsutil CLI tool, like gcloud, is part of the Google Cloud SDK. The gsutil mb (make bucket) command creates the bucket, gsutil cp (copy files and objects) command is used to copy the images to the new bucket, and finally, the gsutil iam (get, set, or change bucket and/or object IAM permissions) command is used to make the images public. I have included a shell script, bucket-uploader.sh, to make this process easier. (gist).

From the Storage Console on GCP, you should observe the images all have publicly accessible URLs. This will allow the Cloud Function to access the bucket, and retrieve and display the images. There are more secure ways to store and display the images from the function. However, this is the simplest method since we are not concerned about making the images public.

We will need the URL of the new Storage bucket, later, when we develop to our Action’s Cloud Function. The bucket URL can be obtained from the Storage Console on GCP, as shown below in the Link URL.

Google Cloud Datastore

In Cloud Datastore, the category data object is referred to as a Kind, similar to a Table in a relational database. In Datastore, we will have an ‘AzureFact’ Kind of data. In Datastore, a single object is referred to as an Entity, similar to a Row in a relational database. Each one of our entities represents a unique reference value from our Azure Facts Intent’s facts entities, such as ‘competition’ and ‘certifications’. Individual data is known as a Property in Datastore, similar to a Column in a relational database. We will have four Properties for each entity: name, response, title, and image. Lastly, a Key in Datastore is similar to a Primary Key in a relational database. The Key we will use for our entities is the unique reference value string from our Azure Facts Intent’s facts entities, such as ‘competition’ or ‘certifications’. The Key value is stored within the entity’s name Property.

There are a number of ways to create the Datastore entities for our Action, including manually from the Datastore console on GCP. However, to automate the process, we will use a script, written in Node.js and using the Google Cloud Datastore Node.js Client, to create the entities. We will use the Client API’s Datastore Class upsert method, which will create or update an entire collection of entities with one call and returns a callback. The script , upsert-entities.js, is included in source control and can be run with the following command. Below is a snippet of the script, which shows the structure of the entities (gist).

Once the upsert command completes successfully, you should observe a collection of ‘AzureFact’ Type Datastore Entities in the Datastore console on GCP.

Below, we see the structure of a single Datastore Entity, the ‘certifications’ Entity, containing the fact response, title, and name of the image, which is stored in our Google Storage bucket.

New ‘Actions on Google’ Project

With the images uploaded and the database entries created, we can start building our Actions for Google Assistant. Using the Actions on Google web console, we first create a new Actions project.

Actions and Intents

We will build our Action’s Intents in Dialogflow. The term Intent, used by Dialogflow, is standard terminology across other voice-assistant platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service and LUIS. In Dialogflow, will be building Intents—the Azure Facts Intent, Welcome Intent, and the Fallback Intent.

Below, we see the Azure Facts Intent. The Azure Facts Intent is the main Intent, responsible for handling our user’s requests for facts about Azure. The Intent includes a fair number, but certainly not an exhaustive list, of training phrases. These represent all the possible ways a user might express intent when invoking the Action. According to Google, the greater the number of natural language examples in the Training Phrases section of Intents, the better the classification accuracy.

Intent Entities

Each of the highlighted words in the training phrases maps to the facts parameter, which maps to a collection of @facts Entities. Entities represent a list of intents the Action is trained to understand. According to Google, there are three types of entities: system (defined by Dialogflow), developer (defined by a developer), and user (built for each individual end-user in every request) entities. We will be creating developer type entities for our Action’s Intent.

Synonyms

An entity contains Synonyms. Multiple synonyms may be mapped to a single reference value. The reference value is the value passed to the Cloud Function by the Action. For example, take the reference value of ‘competition’. A user might ask Google about Azure’s competition. However, the user might also substitute the words ‘competitor’ or ‘competitors’ for ‘competition’. Using synonyms, if the user utters any of these three words in their intent, they will receive the same response.

Although our Azure Facts Action is a simple example, typical Actions might contain hundreds of entities or more, each with several synonyms. Dialogflow provides the option of copy and pasting bulk entities, in either JSON or CSV format. The project’s source code includes both JSON or CSV formats, which may be input in this manner.

Automated Expansion

Not every possible fact, which will have a response, returned by Google Assistant, needs an entity defined. For example, we created a ‘compliance’ Cloud Datastore Entity. The Action understands the term ‘compliance’ and will return a response to the user if they ask about Azure compliance. However, ‘compliance’ is not defined as an Intent Entity, since we have chosen not to define any synonyms for the term ‘compliance’.

In order to allow this, you must enable Allow Automated Expansion. According to Google, this option allows an Agent to recognize values that have not been explicitly listed in the entity. Google describes Agents as NLU (Natural Language Understanding) modules.

Actions on Google Integration

Another configuration item in Dialogflow that needs to be completed is the Dialogflow’s Actions on Google integration. This will integrate the Azure Tech Facts Action with Google Assistant. Google provides more than a dozen different integrations, as shown below.

The Dialogflow’s Actions on Google integration configuration is simple, just choose the Azure Facts Intent as our Action’s Implicit Invocation intent, in addition to the default Welcome Intent, which is our Action’s Explicit Invocation intent. According to Google, integration allows our Action to reach users on every device where the Google Assistant is available.

Action Fulfillment

When an intent is received from the user, it is fulfilled by the Action. In the Dialogflow Fulfillment console, we see the Action has two fulfillment options, a Webhook or a Cloud Function, which can be edited inline. A Webhook allows us to pass information from a matched intent into a web service and get a result back from the service. In our example, our Action’s Webhook will call our Cloud Function, using the Cloud Function’s URL endpoint. We first need to create our function in order to get the endpoint, which we will do next.

Google Cloud Functions

Our Cloud Function, called by our Action, is written in Node.js 8. As stated earlier, Node 8 LTS was the first LTS version to support async/await with Promises. Async/await is the new way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js, replacing callbacks.

Our function, index.js, is divided into four sections: constants, intent handlers, helper functions, and the function’s entry point. The Cloud Function attempts to follow many of the coding practices from Google’s code examples on Github.

Constants

The section defines the global constants used within the function. Note the constant for the URL of our new Cloud Storage bucket, on line 30 below, IMAGE_BUCKET, references an environment variable, process.env.IMAGE_BUCKET. This value is set in the .env.yaml file. All environment variables in the .env.yaml file will be set during the Cloud Function’s deployment, explained later in this post. Environment variables were recently released, and are still considered beta functionality (gist).

The npm package dependencies declared in the constants section, are defined in the dependencies section of the package.json file. Function dependencies include Actions on Google, Firebase Functions, and Cloud Datastore (gist).

Intent Handlers

The three intent handlers correspond to the three intents in the Dialogflow console: Azure Facts Intent, Welcome Intent, and Fallback Intent. Each handler responds in a very similar fashion. The handlers all return a SimpleResponse for audio-only and display-enabled devices. Optionally, a BasicCard is returned for display-enabled devices (gist).

The Welcome Intent handler handles explicit invocations of our Action. The Fallback Intent handler handles both help requests, as well as cases when Dialogflow cannot match any of the user’s input. Lastly, the Azure Facts Intent handler handles implicit invocations of our Action, returning a fact to the user from Cloud Datastore, based on the user’s requested fact.

Helper Functions

The next section of the function contains two helper functions. The primary function is the buildFactResponse function. This is the function that queries Google Cloud Datastore for the fact. The second function, the selectRandomFact, handles the fact value of ‘random’, by selecting a random fact value to query Datastore. (gist).

Async/Await, Promises, and Callbacks

Let’s look closer at the relationship and asynchronous nature of the Azure Facts Intent intent handler and buildFactResponse function. Below, note the async function on line 1 in the intent and the await function on line 3, which is part of the buildFactResponse function call. This is typically how we see async/await applied when calling an asynchronous function, such as buildFactResponse. The await function allows the intent’s execution to wait for the buildFactResponse function’s Promise to be resolved, before attempting to use the resolved value to construct the response.

The buildFactResponse function returns a Promise, as seen on line 28. The Promise’s payload contains the results of the successful callback from the Datastore API’s runQuery function. The runQuery function returns a callback, which is then resolved and returned by the Promise, as seen on line 40 (gist).

The payload returned by Google Datastore, through the resolved Promise to the intent handler, will resemble the example response, shown below. Note the image, response, and title key/value pairs in the textPayload section of the response payload. These are what are used to format the SimpleResponse and BasicCard responses (gist).

Cloud Function Deployment

To deploy the Cloud Function to GCP, use the gcloud CLI with the beta version of the functions deploy command. According to Google, gcloud is a part of the Google Cloud SDK. You must download and install the SDK on your system and initialize it before you can use gcloud. You should ensure that your function is deployed to the same region as your Google Storage Bucket. Currently, Cloud Functions are only available in four regions. I have included a shell script, deploy-cloud-function.sh, to make this step easier. (gist).

The creation or update of the Cloud Function can take up to two minutes. Note the .gcloudignore file referenced in the verbose output below. This file is created the first time you deploy a new function. Using the the .gcloudignore file, you can limit the deployed files to just the function (index.js) and the package.json file. There is no need to deploy any other files to GCP.

If you recall, the URL endpoint of the Cloud Function is required in the Dialogflow Fulfillment tab. The URL can be retrieved from the deployment output (shown above), or from the Cloud Functions Console on GCP (shown below). The Cloud Function is now deployed and will be called by the Action when a user invokes the Action.

Simulation Testing and Debugging

Below, in the Action Simulation console, we see the successful display of the initial Azure Tech Facts containing the expected Simple Response, Basic Card, and Suggestions, triggered by a user’s explicit invocation of the Action.

The simulated response indicates that the Google Cloud Function was called, and it responded successfully. It also indicates that the Google Cloud Function was able to successfully retrieve the correct image from Google Cloud Storage.

Below, we see the successful response to the user’s implicit invocation of the Action, in which they are seeking a fact about Azure’s Cognitive Services. The simulated response indicates that the Google Cloud Function was called, and it responded successfully. It also indicates that the Google Cloud Function was able to successfully retrieve the correct Entity from Google Cloud Datastore, as well as the correct image from Google Cloud Storage.

Logging and Analytics

In addition to the Simulation console’s ability to debug issues with our service, we also have Google Stackdriver Logging. The Stackdriver logs, which are viewed from the GCP management console, contain the complete requests and responses, to and from the Cloud Function, from the Google Assistant Action. The Stackdriver logs will also contain any logs entries you have explicitly placed in the Cloud Function.

We also have the ability to view basic Analytics about our Action from within the Dialogflow Analytics console. Analytics displays metrics, such as the number of sessions, the number of queries, the number of times each Intent was triggered, how often users exited the Action from an intent, and Sessions flows, shown below.

In simple Action such as this one, the Session flow is not very beneficial. However, in more complex Actions, with multiple Intents and a variety potential user interactions, being able to visualize Session flows becomes essential to understanding the user’s conversational path through the Action.

Conclusion

In this post, we have seen how to use the Actions on Google development platform and the latest version of the Dialogflow API to build Google Actions. Google Actions rather effortlessly integrate with the breath Google Cloud Platform’s many serverless offerings, including Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage.

We have seen how Google is quickly maturing their serverless functions, to compete with AWS and Azure, with the recently announced support of LTS version 8 of Node.js and Python, to create an Actions for Google Assistant.

Impact of Serverless

As an Engineer, I have spent endless days, late nights, and thankless weekends, building, deploying and managing servers, virtual machines, container clusters, persistent storage, and database servers. I think what is most compelling about platforms like Actions on Google, but even more so, serverless technologies on GCP, is that I spend the majority of my time architecting and developing compelling software. I don’t spend time managing infrastructure, worrying about capacity, configuring networking and security, and doing DevOps.

¹Azure is a trademark of Microsoft

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients, or Google and Microsoft.

Actions, Cloud, Datastore, Dialogflow, GCP, Google, Google Assistant, Serverless, Voice

4 Comments

Building Asynchronous, Serverless Alexa Skills with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and Node.js

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Cloud, JavaScript, Serverless, Software Development on July 24, 2018

Introduction

In the following post, we will use the new version 2 of the Alexa Skills Kit, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and the latest LTS version Node.js, to create an Alexa Custom Skill. According to Amazon, a custom skill allows you to define the requests the skill can handle (intents) and the words users say to invoke those requests (utterances).

If you want to compare the development of an Alexa Custom Skill with those of Google and Azure, in addition to this post, please read my previous two posts in this series, Building and Integrating LUIS-enabled Chatbots with Slack, using Azure Bot Service, Bot Builder SDK, and Cosmos DB and Building Serverless Actions for Google Assistant with Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Datastore, and Cloud Storage. All three of the article’s demonstrations are written in Node.js, all three leverage their cloud platform’s machine learning-based Natural Language Understanding services, and all three take advantage of NoSQL database and storage services available on their respective cloud platforms.

AWS Technologies

The final high-level architecture of our Alexa Custom Skill will look as follows.

Here is a brief overview of the key AWS technologies we will incorporate into our Skill’s architecture.

Alexa Skills Kit

According to Amazon, the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that makes it possible to add skills to Alexa. The Alexa Skills Kit supports building different types of skills. Currently, Alexa skill types include Custom, Smart Home, Video, Flash Briefing, and List Skills. Each skill type makes use of a different Alexa Skill API.

AWS Serverless Platform

To create a custom skill for Alexa, you currently have the choice of using an AWS Lambda function or a web service. The AWS Lambda is part of an ecosystem of Cloud services and Developer tools, Amazon refers to as the AWS Serverless Platform. The platform’s services are designed to support the development and hosting of highly-performant, enterprise-grade serverless applications.

In this post, we will leverage three of the AWS Serverless Platform’s services, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and AWS Lambda.

Node.js

AWS Lamba supports multiple programming languages, including Node.js (JavaScript), Python, Java (Java 8 compatible), and C# (.NET Core) and Go. All are excellent choices for writing modern serverless functions. For this post, we will use Node.js. According to Node.js Foundation, Node.js is an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.

In April 2018, AWS Lamba announced support for the Node.js 8.10 runtime, which is the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js. Node 8, also known as Project Carbon, was the first LTS version of Node to support async/await with Promises. Async/await is the new way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js. We will make use of async/await and Promises with the custom skill.

Demonstration

To demonstrate Alexa Custom Skills we will build an informational skill that responds to the user with interesting facts about Azure¹, Microsoft’s Cloud computing platform (Alexa talking about Azure, ironic, I know). This is not an official Microsoft skill; it is only used for this demonstration and has not been published.

Source Code

All open-source code for this post can be found on GitHub. Code samples in this post are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Important, this post and the associated source code were updated from v1.0 to v2.0 on 13 August 2018. You should clone the GitHub project again, to correspond with this revised post, if you originally cloned the project before 14 August 2018. Code changes were significant.

Objectives

This objective of the fact-based skill will be to demonstrate the following.

Build, deploy, and test an Alexa Custom Skill using AWS Lambda and Node.js;
Use DynamoDB to store and retrieve Alexa voice responses;
Maintain a count of user’s questions in DynamoDB using atomic counters;
Use Amazon S3 to store and retrieve images, used in Display Cards;
Log Alexa Skill activities using Amazon CloudWatch Logs;

Steps to Build

Building the Azure fact skill will involve the following steps.

Design the Alexa skill’s voice interaction model;
Design the skill’s Display Cards for Alexa-enabled products, to enhance the voice experience;
Create the skill’s DynamoDB table and import the responses the skill will return;
Create an S3 bucket and upload the images used for the Display Cards;
Write the Alexa Skill, which involves mapping the user’s spoken input to the intents your cloud-based service can handle;
Write the Lambda function, which involves responding to the user’s utterances, by building and returning appropriate voice and display card responses, from DynamoDB and S3;
Extend the default ASK-generated AWS IAM Role, to allow the Lambda to update DynamoDB;
Deploy the skill;
Test the skill;

Let’s explore each step in detail.

Voice Interaction Model

First, we must design the fact skill’s voice interaction model. We need to consider the way we want the user to interact with the skill. What is the user’s conversational journey? How do they invoke your skill? How will the user provide intent?

This skill will require two intent slot values, the fact the user is interested in (i.e. ‘global infrastructure’) and the user’s first name (i.e. ‘Susan’). We will train the skill to allow Alexa to query the user for each slot value, but also allow the user to provide either or both values in the initial intent invocation. We will also allow the user to request a random fact.

Shown below in the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console Test tab are three examples of interactions the skill is trained to understand and handle:

The first example on the left invokes the skill with no intent (‘Alexa, load Azure Tech Facts). The user is led through a series of three questions to obtain the full intent.
The center example is similar, however, the initial invocation contains a partial intent (‘Alexa, ask Azure Tech Facts for a fact about certifications’). Alexa must still ask for the user’s name.
Lastly, the example on the right is a so-called ‘one-shot’ invocation (‘Alexa, ask Azure Tech Facts about Azure’s platforms for Gary’). The user’s invocation of the skill contains a complete intent, allowing Alexa to respond immediately with a fact about Azure platforms.

In all cases, our skill has the ability to continue to provide the user with additional facts if they chose, or they may cancel at any time.

We also need to design how Alexa will respond. What is the persona will Alexa assume through her words, phrases, and use of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

User Interaction Previews

Here are a few examples of interactions with the final Alexa skill using an iPhone 8 and the Alexa App. They are intended to show the rich conversational capabilities of custom skills more so the than the display, which is pretty poor on the Alexa App as compared to the Echo Show or even Echo Spot.

Example 1: Indirect Invocation

The first example shows a basic interaction with our Alexa skill. It demonstrates an indirect invocation, a user utterance without initial intent. It also illustrates several variations of user utterances (YouTube).

Example 2: Direct Invocation

The second example of an interaction our skill demonstrates a direct invocation, in which the initial user utterance contains intent. It also demonstrates the user following up with additional requests (YouTube).

Example 3: Direct Invocation, Help, Problem

Lastly, another direct invocation demonstrates the use of the Help Intent. You also see an example of when Alexa does not understand the user’s utterance. The user is able to repeat their request, more clearly (YouTube).

Visual Interaction Model

Many Alexa-enabled devices are capable of both vocal and visual responses. Designing for a multimodal user experience is important. The instructional skill will provide vocal responses, as well as Display Cards optimized for the Amazon Echo Show. The skill contains a basic design for the Display Card shown during the initial invocation, where there is no intent uttered by the user.

The fact skill also contains a Display Card, designed to present the final Alexa response to the user’s intent. The content of the vocal and visual response is returned from DynamoDB via the Lambda function. The random Azure icons, available from Microsoft, are hosted in an S3 bucket. Each fact response is unique, as well as the icon associated with the fact.

The Display Cards will also work on other Alexa-enabled screen-based products. Shown below is the same card on an iPhone 8 using the Amazon Alexa app. This is the same app shown in the videos, above.

DynamoDB

Next, we create the DynamoDB table used to store the facts the Alexa skill will respond with when invoked by the user. DynamoDB is Amazon’s non-relational database that delivers reliable performance at any scale. DynamoDB consists of three basic components: tables, items, and attributes.

There are numerous ways to create a DynamoDB table. For simplicity, I created the AzureFacts DynamoDB table using the AWS CLI (gist). You could also choose CloudFormation, or create the table using any of nine or more programming languages with an AWS SDK.

The AzureFacts table’s schema has four key/value pair attributes per item: Fact, Response, Image, and Hits. The Fact attribute, a string, contains the name of the fact the user is seeking. The Fact attribute also serves as the table’s unique partition key. The Response attribute, a string, contains the conversational response Alexa will return. The Image attribute, a string, contains the name of the image in the S3 bucket displayed by Alexa. Lastly, the Hits attribute, a number, stores the number of user requests for a particular fact.

Importing Table Items

After the DynamoDB table is created, the pre-defined facts are imported into the empty table using AWS CLI (gist). The JSON-formatted data file, AzureFacts.json, is included with the source code on GitHub.

The resulting table should appear as follows in the AWS Management Console.

Note the imported items shown below. The Hits counts reflect the number of times each fact has been requested.

Shown below is a detailed view of a single item that was imported into the DynamoDB table.

Amazon S3 Image Bucket

Next, we create the Amazon S3 bucket, which will house the images, actually Azure icons as PNGs, returned by Alexa with each fact. Again, I used the AWS CLI for simplicity (gist).

The images can be uploaded manually to the bucket through a web browser, or programmatically, using the AWS CLI or SDKs. You will need to ensure the images are made public so they can be displayed by Alexa.

Alexa Skill

Next, we create the actual Alexa custom skill. I have used version 2 of the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Software Development Kit (SDK) for Node.js and the new ASK Command Line Interface (ASK CLI) to create the skill. The ASK SDK v2 for Node.js was recently released in April 2018. If you have previously written Alexa skills using version 1 of the Node.js SDK, the creation of a new project and the format of the Lambda Node.js code is somewhat different. I strongly suggest reviewing the example skills provided by Amazon on GitHub.

With version 1, I would have likely used the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console to develop and deploy the skill, and separate IDE, like JetBrains WebStorm, to write the Lambda. The JSON-format skill would live in the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console, and my Lambda in source control. I would have used AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) or Claudia.js to handle the deployment of Lambda functions.

With version 2 of ASK, you can easily create and manage the Alexa skill’s JSON-formatted code, as well as the Lambda, all from the command-line and a single IDE or text editor. All components that comprise the skill can be kept together in source control. I now only use the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console to preview my deployed skill and for testing. I am not going to go into detail about creating a new project using the ASK CLI, I suggest reviewing Amazon’s instructional guides.

Below, I have initiated a new AWS profile for the Alexa skill using the ask init command.

There are three main parts to the new skill project created by the ASK CLI: the skill’s manifest (skill.json), model(s) (en-US.json), and API endpoint, the Lambda (index.js). The skill’s manifest, skill.json, contains information (metadata) about the skill. This is the same information you find in the Distribution tab of the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console. The manifest includes publishing information, example phrases to invoke the skill, the skill’s category, distribution locales, privacy information, and the location of the skill’s API endpoint, the Lambda. An end-user would most commonly see this information in Amazon Alexa app when adding skills to their Alexa-enabled devices.

Next, the skill’s model, en-US.json, is located the models sub-directory. This file defines the skill’s custom interaction model, it contains the skill’s interaction model written in JSON, which includes the invocation name, intents, standard and custom slots, sample utterances, slot values, and synonyms of those values. This is the same information you would find in the Build tab of the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console. Amazon has an excellent guide to creating your custom skill’s interaction model.

Intents and Intent Slots

The skill’s custom interaction model contains the AzureFactsIntent intent, along with the boilerplate Cancel, Help and Stop intents. The AzureFactsIntent intent contains two intent slots, myName and myQuestion. The myName intent slot is a standard AMAZON.US_FIRST_NAME slot type. According to Amazon, this slot type understands thousands of popular first names commonly used by speakers in the United States. Shown below, I have included a short list of sample utterances in the intent model, which helps improve voice recognition for Alexa (gist).

Custom Slot Types and Entities

The myQuestion intent slot is a custom slot type. According to Amazon, a custom slot type defines a list of representative values for the slot. The myQuestion slot contains all the available facts the custom instructional skill understands and can retrieve from DynamoDB. Like myName, the user can provide the fact intent in various ways (gist).

This slot also contains synonyms for each fact. Collectively, the slot value, it’s synonyms, and the optional ID are collectively referred to as an Entity. According to Amazon, entity resolution improves the way Alexa matches possible slot values in a user’s utterance with the slots defined in the skill’s interaction model.

An example of an entity in the myQuestion custom slot type is ‘competition’. A user can ask Alexa to tell them about Azure’s competition. The slot value ‘competition’ returns a fact about Azure’s leading competitors, as reported on the G2 Crowd website’s Microsoft Azure Alternatives & Competitors page. However, the user might also substitute the words ‘competitor’ or ‘competitors’ for ‘competition’. Using synonyms, if the user utters any of these three words in their intent, they will receive the same response from Alexa (gist).

Lambda

Initializing a skill with the ASK CLI also creates the default API endpoint, a Lambda (index.js). The serverless Lambda function is written in Node.js 8.10. As mentioned in the Introduction, AWS recently announced support for the Node.js 8.10 runtime, in April. This is the first LTS version of Node to support async/await with Promises. Node’s async/await is the new way of handling asynchronous operations in Node.js.

The layout of the custom skill’s Lambda’s code closely follows the custom Alexa Fact Skill example. I suggest closely reviewing this example. The Lambda has four main sections: constants, setup code, intent handlers, and helper functions.

In addition to the boilerplate Help, Stop, Error, and Session intent handlers, there are the LaunchRequestHandler and the AzureFactsIntent handlers. According to Amazon, a LaunchRequestHandler fires when the Lambda receives a LaunchRequest from Alexa, in which the user invokes the skill with the invocation name, but does not provide any command mapping to an intent.

The AzureFactsIntent aligns with the custom intent we defined in the skill’s model (en-US.json), of the same name. This handler handles an IntentRequest from Alexa. This handler and the buildFactResponse function the handler calls are what translate a request for a fact from the user into a request to DynamoDB for a response.

The AzureFactsIntent handler checks the IntentRequest for both the myName and myQuestion slot values. If the values are unfulfilled, the AzureFactsIntent handler delegates responsibility back to Alexa, using a Dialog delegate directive (addDelegateDirective). Alexa then requests the slot values from the user in a conversational interaction. Alexa then calls the AzureFactsIntent handler again (gist).

Once both slot values are received by the AzureFactsIntent handler, it calls the buildFactResponse function, passing in the myName and myQuestion slot values. In turn, the buildFactResponse function calls AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient.update. The DynamoDB update returns a callback. In turn, the buildFactResponse function returns a Promise, a standard built-in object type, part of the JavaScript ES2015 spec (gist).

What is unique about the DynamoDB update call in this case, is it actually performs two functions. First, it implements an Atomic Counter. According to AWS, an atomic counter is a numeric DynamoDB attribute that is incremented, unconditionally, without interfering with other write requests. The update increments the numeric Hits attribute of the requested fact by exactly one. Secondly, the update returns the DynamoDB item. We can increment the count and get the response in a single call.

The buildFactResponse function’s Promise returns the DynamoDB item, a JSON object, from the callback. An example of a JSON response payload is shown below. (gist).

The AzureFactsIntent handler uses the async/await methods to perform the call to the buildFactResponse function. Note line 7 of the AzureFactsIntent handler below, where the async method is applied directly to the handler. Note line 33 where the await method is used with the call to the buildFactResponse function (gist).

The AzureFactsIntent handler awaits the Promise from the buildFactResponse function. In an async function, you can await for any Promise or catch its rejection cause. If the update callback and the ensuing Promise were both returned successfully, the AzureFactsIntent handler returns both a vocal and visual response to Alexa.

AWS IAM Role

By default, an AWS IAM Role was created by ASK when the project was initialized, the ask-lambda-alexa-skill-azure-facts role. This role is automatically associated with the AWS Managed Policy, AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole. This managed policy simply allows the skill’s Lambda function to create Amazon CloudWatch Events (gist).

For the skill’s Lambda to read and write to DynamoDB, we must extend the default role’s permissions, by adding an additional policy. I have created a new AzureFacts_Alexa_Skill IAM Policy, which allows the associated role to get and update items from the AzureFacts DynamoDB table, and that is it. The role only has access to two of forty possible DynamoDB actions, and only for the AzureFacts table, and nothing else. Following the principle of Least Privilege is a cornerstone of AWS Security (gist).

Below, we see the new IAM Policy in the AWS Management Console.

Below, we see the policy being applied to the skill’s IAM Role, along with the original AWS managed policy.

Deploying the Skill

Version 2 of the ASK CLI makes deploying the Alexa custom skill very easy. Using the ASK CLI’s deploy command, we can validate and deploy the skill (manifest), model, and Lambda, all at once, as shown below. This makes DevOps automation of skill deployments with tools like Jenkins or AWS CodeDeploy straight-forward.

You can verify the skill has been deployed, from the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console. You should observe the skill’s model (intents, slots, entities, and endpoints) in the Build tab. You should observe the skill’s publishing details in the Distribution tab. Note deploying the skill does not submit the skill to Amazon’s for review and publishing, you must still submit the skill separately.

From the AWS Lambda Management Console, you should observe the skill’s Lambda was deployed. You should observe only the skill can trigger the Lambda. Lastly, you should observe that the correct IAM Role was applied to the Lambda, giving the Lambda access to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon DynamoDB.

Testing the Skill

The ASK CLI comes with the simulate command. According to Amazon, the simulate command simulates an invocation of the skill with text-based input. Again, the ASK CLI makes DevOps test automation with tools like Jenkins or AWS CodeDeploy pretty easy (gist).

Below, are the results of simulating the invocation. The simulate command returns the expected verbal response, including any SSML, and the visual responses (the Display Card). You could easily write an automation script to run a battery of these tests on every code commit, and prior to deployment.

I also like to manually test my skills from the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console Test tab. You may invoke the skill using your voice or by typing the skill invocation.

The Alexa Skills Kit Development Console Test tab both shows and speaks Alexa’s response. The console also displays the request and response body (JSON input/output), as well as the Display Card for an Echo Show and Echo Spot.

Lastly, the Alexa Skills Kit Development Console Test tab displays the Device Log. The log captures Alexa Directives and Events. I have found the Device Log to be very helpful in troubleshooting problems with deployed skills.

CloudWatch Logs

By default the custom skill outputs events to CloudWatch Logs. I have added the DynamoDB callback payload, as well as the slot values of myName and myQuestion to the logs, for each successful Alexa response. CloudWatch logs, like the Device Logs above, are very helpful in troubleshooting problems with deployed skills.

Conclusion

In this brief post, we have seen how to use the new ASK SDK/CLI version 2, services from the AWS Serverless Platform, and the LTS version of Node.js, to create an Alexa Custom Skill. Using the AWS Serverless Platform, we could easily extend the example to take advantage of additional serverless services, such as the use of Amazon SNS and SQS for notifications and messaging and Amazon Kinesis for analytics.

In a future post, we will extend this example, adding the capability to securely add and update our DynamoDB table’s items. We will use addition AWS services, including Amazon Cognito to authorize access to our API. We will also use AWS API Gateway to integrate with our Lambdas, producing a completely serverless API.

¹Azure is a trademark of Microsoft

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

Alexa, Alexa Skill, Amazon, ASK, AWS, Custom Skill, DynamoDB, Lambda, Node, Node.js, S3, Serverless, Virtual Assistant

3 Comments

Using Eventual Consistency and Spring for Kafka to Manage a Distributed Data Model: Part 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on June 18, 2018

Given a modern distributed system, composed of multiple microservices, each possessing a sub-set of the domain’s aggregate data they need to perform their functions autonomously, we will almost assuredly have some duplication of data. Given this duplication, how do we maintain data consistency? In this two-part post, we’ve been exploring one possible solution to this challenge, using Apache Kafka and the model of eventual consistency. In Part One, we examined the online storefront domain, the storefront’s microservices, and the system’s state change event message flows.

Part Two

In Part Two of this post, I will briefly cover how to deploy and run a local development version of the storefront components, using Docker. The storefront’s microservices will be exposed through an API Gateway, Netflix’s Zuul. Service discovery and load balancing will be handled by Netflix’s Eureka. Both Zuul and Eureka are part of the Spring Cloud Netflix project. To provide operational visibility, we will add Yahoo’s Kafka Manager and Mongo Express to our system.

Source code for deploying the Dockerized components of the online storefront, shown in this post, is available on GitHub. All Docker Images are available on Docker Hub. I have chosen the wurstmeister/kafka-docker version of Kafka, available on Docker Hub; it has 580+ stars and 10M+ pulls on Docker Hub. This version of Kafka works well, as long as you run it within a Docker Swarm, locally.

Code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Deployment Options

For simplicity, I’ve used Docker’s native Docker Swarm Mode to support the deployed online storefront. Docker requires minimal configuration as opposed to other CaaS platforms. Usually, I would recommend Minikube for local development if the final destination of the storefront were Kubernetes in Production (AKS, EKS, or GKE). Alternatively, if the final destination of the storefront were Red Hat OpenShift in Production, I would recommend Minishift for local development.

Docker Deployment

We will break up our deployment into two parts. First, we will deploy everything, except our services. We will allow Kafka, MongoDB, Eureka, and the other components to startup up fully. Afterward, we will deploy the three online storefront services. The storefront-kafka-docker project on Github contains two Docker Compose files, which are divided between the two tasks.

The middleware Docker Compose file (gist).

The services Docker Compose file (gist).

In the storefront-kafka-docker project, there is a shell script, stack_deploy_local.sh. This script will execute both Docker Compose files, in succession, with a pause in between. You may need to adjust the timing for your own system (gist).

Start by running docker swarm init. This command will initialize a Docker Swarm. Next, execute the stack deploy script, using an sh ./stack_deploy_local.sh command. The script will deploy a new Docker Stack, within the Docker Swarm. The Docker Stack will hold all storefront components, deployed as individual Docker containers. The stack is deployed within its own isolated Docker overlay network, kafka-net.

Note we are not using host-based persistent storage for this local development demo. Destroying the Docker stack or the individual Kafka, Zookeeper, or MongoDB Docker containers will result in a loss of data.

Before completion, the stack deploy script runs docker stack ls command, followed by a docker stack services storefront command. You should see one stack, names storefront, with ten services. You should also see each of the ten services has 1/1 replicas running, indicated everything has started or is starting correctly, without failure. A failure would be reflected here as a service having 0/1 replicas.

Before completion, the stack deploy script also runs docker container ls command. You should observe each of the ten running containers (‘services’ in the Docker stack), along with their instance names and ports.

There is also a shell script, stack_delete_local.sh, which will issue a docker stack rm storefront command to destroy the stack when you are done.

Using the names of the storefront’s Docker containers, you can check the start-up logs of any of the components, using the docker logs command.

Testing the Stack

With the storefront stack deployed, we need to confirm that all the components have started correctly and are communicating with each other. To accomplish this, I’ve written a simple Python script, refresh.py. The refresh script has multiple uses. It deletes any existing storefront service MongoDB databases. It also deletes any existing Kafka topics; I call the Kafka Manager’s API to accomplish this. We have no databases or topics since our stack was just created. However, if you are actively developing your data models, you will likely want to purge the databases and topics regularly (gist).

Next, the refresh script calls a series of RESTful HTTP endpoints, in a specific order, to create sample data. Our three storefront services each expose different endpoints. The different /sample endpoints create sample customers, orders, order fulfillment requests, and shipping notifications. The create sample data endpoints include, in order:

Sample Customer: /accounts/customers/sample
Sample Orders: /orders/customers/sample/orders
Sample Fulfillment Requests: /orders/customers/sample/fulfill
Sample Processed Order Events: /fulfillment/fulfillment/sample/process
Sample Shipped Order Events: /fulfillment/fulfillment/sample/ship
Sample In-Transit Order Events: /fulfillment/fulfillment/sample/in-transit
Sample Received Order Events: /fulfillment/fulfillment/sample/receive

You could create data on your own, by POSTing to the exposed CRUD endpoints on each service. However, given the complex data objects required in the request payloads, it is too time-consuming for this demo.

To execute the script, use a python3 ./refresh.py command. I am using Python 3 in the demo, but the script should also work with Python 2.x, if you change shebang.

If everything was successful, the script returns one document from each of the three storefront service’s MongoDB database collections. A result of ‘None’ for any of the MongoDB documents usually indicates one of the earlier commands failed. Given an abnormally high response latency, due to the load of the ten running containers on my laptop, I had to increase the Zuul/Ribbon timeouts.

Observing the System

We should now have the online storefront Docker stack running, three MongoDB databases created and populated with sample documents (data), and three Kafka topics, which have messages in them. Based on the fact we saw database documents printed out with our refresh script, we know the topics were used to pass data between the message producing and message consuming services.

In most enterprise environments, a developer may not the access, nor the operational knowledge to interact with Kafka or MongoDB from within a container, on the command line. So how else can we interact with the system?

Kafka Manager

Kafka Manager gives us the ability to interact with Kafka via a convenient browser-based user interface. For this demo, the Kafka Manager UI is available on default port 9000.

To make Kafka Manager useful, define the Kafka cluster. The Cluster Name is up to you. The Cluster Zookeeper Host should be zookeeper:2181, for our demo.

Kafka Manager gives us useful insights into many aspects of our simple, single-broker cluster. You should observe three topics, created during the deployment of Kafka.

Kafka Manager is an appealing alternative, as opposed to connecting with the Kafka container, with a docker exec command, to interact with Kafka. A typical use case might be deleting a topic or adding partitions to a topic. We can also see which Consumers are consuming which topics, from within Kafka Manager.

Mongo Express

Similar to Kafka Manager, Mongo Express gives us the ability to interact with Kafka via a user interface. For this demo, the Mongo Express browser-based user interface is available on default port 8081. The initial view displays each of the existing databases. Note our three service’s databases, including accounts, orders, and fulfillment.

Drilling into an individual database, we can view each of the database’s collections. Digging in further, we can interact with individual database collection documents.

We may even edit and save the documents.

SpringFox and Swagger

Each of the storefront services also implements SpringFox, the automated JSON API documentation for API’s built with Spring. With SpringFox, each service exposes a rich Swagger UI. The Swagger UI allows us to interact with service endpoints.

Since each service exposes its own Swagger interface, we must access them through the Zuul API Gateway on port 8080. In our demo environment, the Swagger browser-based user interface is accessible at /swagger-ui.html. Below, is a fully self-documented Orders service API, as seen through the Swagger UI.

I believe there are still some incompatibilities with the latest SpringFox release and Spring Boot 2, which prevents Swagger from showing the default Spring Data REST CRUD endpoints. Currently, you only see the API endpoints you explicitly declare in your Controller classes.

The service’s data models (POJOs) are also exposed through the Swagger UI by default. Below we see the Orders service’s models.

The Swagger UI allows you to drill down into the complex structure of the models, such as the CustomerOrder entity, exposing each of the entity’s nested data objects.

Spring Cloud Netflix Eureka

This post does not cover the use of Eureka or Zuul. Eureka gives us further valuable insight into our storefront system. Eureka is our systems service registry and provides load-balancing for our services if we had multiple instances.

For this demo, the Eureka browser-based user interface is available on default port 8761. Within the Eureka user interface, we should observe the three storefront services and Zuul, the API Gateway, registered with Eureka. If we had more than one instance of each service, we would see all of them listed here.

Although of limited use in a local environment, we can observe some general information about our host.

Interacting with the Services

The three storefront services are fully functional Spring Boot / Spring Data REST / Spring HATEOAS-enabled applications. Each service exposes a rich set of CRUD endpoints for interacting with the service’s data entities. Additionally, each service includes Spring Boot Actuator. Actuator exposes additional operational endpoints, allowing us to observe the running services. Again, this post is not intended to be a demonstration of Spring Boot or Spring Boot Actuator.

Using an application, such as Postman, we can interact with our service’s RESTful HTTP endpoints. Shown below, we are calling the Account service’s customers resource. The Accounts request is proxied through the Zuul API Gateway.

The above Postman Storefront Collection and Postman Environment are both exported and saved with the project.

Some key endpoints to observe the entities that were created using Event-Carried State Transfer are as follows. They assume you are using localhost as a base URL.

Zuul Registered Routes: /actuator/routes
Accounts Service Customers: /accounts/customers
Orders Service Customer Orders: /orders/customerOrderses
Fulfillment Service Fulfillments: /fulfillment/fulfillments

References

Links to my GitHub projects for this post

Some additional references I found useful while authoring this post and the online storefront code:

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

Apache Kafka, API, docker, Eureka, Kafka, Messaging, Spring, Zuul