Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most popular topics in the IT industry. An IoT ecosystem consists of web-enabled smart devices, such as Amazon Echo, Google Mini, etc., that use embedded systems, such as processors, sensors and communication hardware, to collect, send and act on the data they acquire from their environment. Traditionally people had to worry about managing their cloud environment along with the IoT tasks. It was a bit harder for someone to launch a server and manage it for their IoT devices. People have to maintain their environment, install necessary packages, and so on.
AWS IoT provides software and services that help us to integrate IoT devices into AWS IoT-based solutions. AWS IoT platform provides cloud services and device software to help us connect our IoT devices with other devices like AWS cloud applications or AWS IoT-based solutions. AWS IoT was launched in 2015. It provides services for all security layers, including preventive security mechanisms, like encryption and access control to device data, and a service to consistently monitor and audit configurations. AWS brings AI and IoT under a single roof to make more intelligent devices. You can create prototypes in the cloud and deploy them to systems where they run twice as faster when compared to alternatives.
AWS IoT is built on a safe and secure cloud infrastructure and can be scaled to billions of devices and trillions of messages. AWS IoT integrates with other AWS services, which allows us to build complex and complete solutions.
Device software
FreeRTOS
FreeRTOS is an open source, the dependable, simple, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easier to code, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. FreeRTOS incorporates a kernel and a set of evolving software libraries. This involves safely plugging in your small, low-power devices to AWS Cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS IoT Greengrass. FreeRTOS is made with stress on reliability and ease of use and provides the predictability of long-term support releases.
AWS IoT Greengrass
AWS IoT Greengrass is an Internet of Things (IoT) open-source edge runtime and cloud service that assists you to build, deploy, and manage device software. Clients use AWS IoT Greengrass for their IoT applications on millions of devices in houses, offices, vehicles, factories and businesses. You have the liberty to program your devices to act locally on the data they produce, execute predictions based on machine learning models, filter and aggregate device data, and transmit only necessary information to the cloud.
Connectivity & control services
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core helps you connect IoT devices to the AWS cloud without the necessity to provision or manage servers. AWS IoT Core can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices accurately and securely. With AWS IoT Core, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they are disconnected.
AWS IoT Device Defender
AWS IoT Device Defender is a totally managed service that assists you to secure your fleet of IoT devices. AWS IoT Device Defender continuously audits your IoT configurations to make sure that they aren’t sliding away from best practices of security. A configuration is an array of technical controls you set to keep information safe when devices are communicating with each other and the cloud. AWS IoT Device Defender makes it simple to maintain and enforce IoT configurations, such as ensuring device identity, authenticating and authorizing devices, and encrypting device data. AWS IoT Device Defender consistently audits the IoT configurations on your devices against a group of predefined security protocols. AWS IoT Device Defender sends an alert if there are any shortcomings in your IoT setup that might pose a security risk, such as identity certificates being shared across different devices or a device with a reversed identity certificate trying to plug into AWS IoT Core.
AWS IoT Device Management
As most IoT deployments consist of hundred of thousand to millions of devices, it is important to track, monitor, and manage connected device fleets. You need to make sure that your IoT devices work properly and securely after they have been deployed. You also need to secure access to your devices, monitor health, detect problems and troubleshoot remotely, and manage software and firmware updates.
Analytics services
AWS IoT Analytics
AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that makes it simple to run and operationalize complex analytics on huge volumes of IoT data without any worries on cost and complexity fronts typically required to build an IoT analytics framework. It is the simplest mode to run analytics on IoT data and get insights to make better and more accurate decisions for IoT applications and machine learning use cases.
AWS IoT SiteWise
AWS IoT SiteWiseis a managed service that makes it simple to gather, store, sort, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to assist you to make better, data-driven decisions. You can use AWS IoT SiteWise to monitor operations across facilities, quickly compute common industrial performance metrics, and create applications that analyze industrial equipment data to prevent expensive equipment issues and lower gaps in production. This allows you to gather data consistently across devices, identify issues with remote monitoring faster, and improve multi-site processes with centralized data.
AWS IoT Events
AWS IoT Events is a fully managed service that makes it simple to sense and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications. Events are patterns of data identifying more complex circumstances than expected, such as changes in equipment when a belt is stuck or motion detectors using movement signals to activate lights and security cameras. Before IoT Events, you had to build expensive, custom applications to collect data, apply decision logic to sense an event, and then trigger another application to act upon the event. Using IoT Events, it is simple to sense events across thousands of IoT sensors sending different telemetry data, such as temperature from a freezer, humidity from respiratory equipment, and belt speed on a motor. You simply pick the relevant data sources to ingest, define the logic for each event using simple ‘if-then-else statements, and select the alert or custom action to trigger when an event occurs. IoT Events consistently monitors data from multiple IoT sensors and applications, and it integrates with other services, such as AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Analytics, to trigger early detection and unique insights into events. IoT Events automatically triggers alerts and actions in response to events based on the logic you define to resolve issues faster, lower maintenance costs, and improve operational efficiency.
AWS IoT Things Graph
AWS IoT Things Graph is a service that makes it easy to visually connect multiple devices and web services to form IoT applications. Today, IoT applications are made using a variety of devices and web services to automate tasks for use cases of a wide range, such as smart homes, industrial automation, and energy management. Because there aren’t any centrally adopted standards, it is not easy for developers to get devices from different manufacturers to connect to each other as well as with web services. This forces developers to write lots of code to bind together all the devices and web services they require for their IoT application. AWS IoT Things Graph provides a visual drag-and-drop interface for linking and coordinating communications among devices and web services, so you can build IoT applications faster. For example, in a commercial agriculture application, you can define communications between humidity, temperature, and sprinkler sensors with weather data services in the cloud to automate watering. You represent devices and services using pre-built reusable components, called models, that hide low-level details, such as protocols and interfaces and are easy to integrate or create complex workflows. The AWS IoT Device SDK incorporates client libraries, developer manual, porting manual and supports programming languages like C, JavaScript, Arduino.
Conclusion
In simple words, AWS makes it very easy and quick to create and manage an IoT environment. The IoT platform market is growing rapidly. There are a lot of companies appearing in this market. AWS for IoT devices will certainly be a feature packed one stop solution for most of the IoT needs in the future
