ATIX #CrewDay: Rhino learns to speak!

Of course, colleagues from marketing are not left out at #CrewDay. It is therefore important to find topics that are relevant to all departments. Against this background, a colleague had the idea some time ago to create a new host using orcharhino using voice control. A perfect project for #CrewDay! So it wasn’t a matter of waiting for long, but rather teaching our rhino to speak. Rhino? Is that a colleague at ATIX? Fast – Rhino is the “mascot” of our product orcharhino. With this, data centers can be further automated and the deployment, configuration and patch management of Linux servers can be implemented under a uniform interface.

But back to our little Alexa project: First we had to explore the available options. Option one would be to write your own Alexa skill. Variant two is the one we initially decided on: We used Node-RED as a communication mediator between Amazon Echo Dot and orcharhino. Node-RED was initially designed by IBM and is available under an open source license. This means that scenarios in the Internet of Things can be put together directly in the browser like in a modular system. In addition to Alexa, other modules are available for Google services, IRC, social media platforms and for controlling smart home devices. Another idea immediately came up: Why not build a new server using orcharhino with the help of a tweet?

After installing Node-RED using “npm” you can access it directly with the browser via http://127.0.0.1:1880. Additional modules can be searched for and installed using the “Manage Palette” via the menu on the right next to “Deploy”. Here we have added the node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill [1] module. This module uses a server [2] on the Internet with which it communicates between Alexa and Node-RED. We actually wanted to avoid that and implement everything locally. But then we realized that other modules [3] that were content with the local network were no longer applicable. Because Node-RED, Alexa and orcharhino are not in the same network. It took a few minutes until there was successful communication between Alexa and Node-RED. We were now able to receive the first voice commands via Node-RED. The next step was to connect orcharhino.

Node-RED has a module for sending HTTP requests. The orcharhino API allows you to control almost everything via appropriate API calls. This includes creating content views, deleting compute resources and starting a deployment process for new hosts. This was done in a short time and we were able to ask Alexa to build a new host with “Alexa, rhino on” (we use rhino instead of orcharhino because we as developers know: “The spice is in brevity” 😉 ).

Now the solution for anyone who is wondering why we used “orcharhino on” as a command: This node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill internally maps smart home functionalities such as lamp control. Therefore, the skill of syntax and voice commands is unsuitable for our use case.

But that’s only mentioned in passing, now back to the essentials:

Creating new hosts by tweeting and posting a message to an IRC channel as soon as a new host is available 🙂

The finished Node-RED flow looks like this:

To control the orcharhino API we had to define the header and the HTTPS post body. For this we used the following method:

//set headers and payload
var payload = { "host":  {
  "enabled": true,
  "compute_resource_id":"1",  
  "hostgroup_id":"1",
  "location_id":"2",
  "organization_id":"1",
  "compute_attributes": {
   "start":"1"
},
"interfaces_attributes": {
  "0":{
     "subnet_id":"1"
   }
  }
}};
// construct the result
msg.payload= JSON.stringify(payload);
msg.headers = {};
msg.headers["Content-Type"] = "application/json";
msg.headers["Accept"] = "application/json";
return msg;

After the message has been sent via “Send orcharhino HTTPS Post”, Node-RED receives the response to the HTTPS Post Request in “Set New Host Msg”. In this Javascript function we extract the name of the new host:

//Set New Host Msg
var hostname = msg.payload.match(/"name":"([a-zA-Z-.]*).stage.atix"/); 
var msg = {};

if (hostname !== null{
  msg.payload = "New Host created: " + hostname[1];
}

return msg;