“Alexa, ask coder enterprise to rebuild my cloud environment”

Estimated Reading Time : 2m

Hackathon

We recently had a hackathon at work.

A whole day to work on whatever we wanted.

What to build?

I’ve been meaning to explore serverless technologies.

However, one of the constraints of the hackathon was that we needed to build something related to our product.

I recently championed the backend portion of a new feature at work for automating cloud environment rebuilds at a pre-configured time on a daily interval. (You can read about our new autostart feature here if you’d like to learn more)

I thought it might be cool to give our users (and ourselves) another way to interface with our cloud IDE’s.

Enter Gecko

Gecko is an open source Amazon Alexa skill written in Go.

Gecko enables users to trigger voice-activated cloud environment builds for their existing Coder environments.

Demo

Gecko is meant to be deployed as an AWS Lambda function.

You can find the source code and instructions on how to configure Gecko for your Coder environment on my github.

I had a great time building this and my project was even featured on our blog at work.

Happy Coding & much love!

-Faris