An Alexa smart home ecosystem contains the following:

• Customer:  The person interacting with the Alexa-enabled device and owner of cloud-enabled devices
• The Smart Home Skill API:  A service that understands the voice commands and converts them to directives (JSON messages) that are sent to smart home skills
•  AWS Lambda:  A compute service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that hosts the smart home skill code, which is called a skill adapter
• Smart home skill: Code and configuration that interpret directives and send messages to a device cloud
• Device cloud: The cloud environment provided by a device vendor that controls and manages the customer’s cloud-enabled devices