Alexa Skills can be developed using Alexa Lambda functions or a REST API endpoint. Lambda function is Amazon's implementation of serverless functions available in AWS. Amazon recommends using Lambda functions despite the fact that they are not easy to debug. While you can log to a CloudWatch log, you can't hit a breakpoint and step into the code.
This makes live debugging of Alexa requests a very hard task. In this post, we will implement a custom Skill for Amazon Alexa by using Node.js, npm, and AWS Lambda Functions. This Skill is basically a "Hello World" example. With this post, you will be able to create a custom Skill for Amazon Alexa, implement functionality by using Node.js, and start your custom skill both from your local computer and from AWS. This post contains materials from different resources that can be seen in the Resources section.