An introduction to Internet of Things (IoT) with AWS

Agnasarp
8 min readJun 9, 2021

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IoT with AWS

No surprise we are in an era with billions of devices that are positioned in our homes, schools, offices, vehicles, and simply all around the world. We have to have a mechanism to interconnect them and use data generated from them wisely. Old classic solutions will not have the capability to cater to the highly increasing demand. AWS has come up with a full solution set with cloud technology. In their platform, they are mainly concerned about the capabilities of data analysis, security, AI integration, and scalability.

AWS provides comprehensive and in-depth IoT services from edge to cloud. AWS IoT is the only cloud provider that combines comprehensive data management and analytics with simple services vast IoT data combinations. AWS IoT provides services for all levels of security, including security mechanisms such as encryption and access control to device data, and services for continuous monitoring and audit configurations. AWS combines artificial intelligence with the Internet of Things to make devices smarter. Templates run 2x faster than others, so you can create your own templates in the cloud and publish them to devices. AWS IoT is built on a proven and reliable cloud infrastructure that spans billions of devices and billions of messages. AWS IoT integrates with other AWS services to provide a complete solution.

There are lots of use cases that AWS IoT customers have built with a bunch of provided technologies. Customers have built industrial IoT applications for predictive quality and maintenance and to remotely monitor operations, connected home applications for home automation, home security and monitoring, and home networking and commercial applications for traffic monitoring, public safety, and health monitoring. AWS provides a variety of IoT services and solutions.

AWS IoT services

Device software

FreeRTOS

FreeRTOS is an open-source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that facilitates programming, implementation, security, connectivity, and management of small, low-power devices. FreeRTOS is distributed for free under the MIT Open Source License, and a growing number of software libraries are suitable for use in a variety of industries and applications. This includes securely connecting small, energy-efficient devices to advanced devices using AWS cloud services such as AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Greengrass. With a focus on stability and ease of use, FreeRTOS provides predictability of long-term support releases.

AWS IoT Greengrass

AWS IoT Greengrass is an open-source IoT service that helps you build, deploy, and manage device software. Customers use AWS IoT Greengrass for IoT applications in millions of homes, factories, vehicles, and enterprise devices. The generated data can be used to plan local device operations, make predictions based on machine learning models, and filter and aggregate device data. Only important information can be sent to the cloud.

Connectivity & control services

AWS IoT Core

AWS IoT Core allows you to connect your IoT devices to the AWS Cloud without the need to set up or manage servers. AWS IoT Core supports billions of devices and billions of messages, ensuring those messages are processed and tracked by AWS and other device endpoints. AWS IoT Core allows your app to monitor and communicate with any device, even when not connected.

AWS IoT Device Defender

AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that you can use to secure a set of IoT devices. AWS IoT Device Defender continuously monitors your IoT settings to ensure you are not deviating from optimal security measures. A configuration is a set of engineering controls deployed so that information is provided when devices communicate with the cloud and with each other. AWS IoT Device Defender makes it easy to manage and run IoT settings such as device authentication, device authorization, and device data encryption. AWS IoT Device Defender continuously evaluates the IoT settings of your device against a predefined set of security measures. If there are vulnerabilities in your IoT configuration that may pose a security risk, such as the sharing of an identity certificate among multiple devices, or a device with a revoked identity certificate trying to connect to AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Defender will send an alert.

AWS IoT Device Management

When deploying hundreds of IoT devices, it is critical to track, monitor, and manage connected devices that span hundreds of thousands to millions of devices. After deployment, you need to ensure that your IoT devices are functioning properly and securely. You must also have secure access to your device, monitor device health, perform remote troubleshooting, and manage software and operating system updates. AWS IoT Device Management can easily and securely register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices on a large scale.

Analytics services

AWS IoT Analytics

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, run, and perform complex analytics on large volumes of IoT data without having to worry about the cost and complexity of running IoT in general. This is the easiest way to analyze IoT data, gain insights, and make more accurate and better decisions for IoT and machine learning applications.

AWS IoT SiteWise

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that facilitates the collection, storage, organization, and monitoring of data in industrial equipment and helps make better data-driven decisions. Use AWS IoT SiteWise to monitor the operations of any equipment, quickly calculate industry-wide performance metrics, analyze industrial equipment data, avoid costly downtime, and reduce production delays. This allows you to continuously collect data across devices, quickly identify remote monitoring issues, and improve multi-site operations with centralized data.

AWS IoT Events

AWS IoT Events is a fully managed service that makes it easy to detect and respond to events using IoT sensors and applications. There are event data models that define more complex situations than expected. Example: Motion detectors use motion signals to activate lights or security cameras when the line is down. Before IoT events, you had to create expensive custom programs that collect data and apply decision logic to identify events and launch other programs that respond to those events. When an IoT incident occurs, the event can be easily detected with thousands of IoT sensors that send various remote data such as freezer temperature, the humidity of respiratory equipment, and belt speed to the engine. You just need to identify the relevant data sources that should be selected, use simple statements to define the logic for each event, and define the alerts or actions to be generated when the event occurs. IoT Events continuously monitors data from multiple IoT sensors and applications and integrates with other services such as AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Analytics to quickly detect events and gain unique insights. IoT Events automatically generate alerts and actions in response to events based on defined logic to expedite troubleshooting, reduce maintenance costs and improve operational efficiency.

AWS IoT Things Graph

AWS IoT Things Graph is a service that enables you to build IoT applications by enabling visual connections between various devices and web services. Today, applications are designed with a variety of web tools and services to automate tasks in a variety of use cases such as smart home, industrial automation, and enterprise energy management. Currently, there is no widely accepted standard that makes it difficult for developers to interconnect devices from different manufacturers and connect to web services. This requires developers to write a lot of code to connect their web services to any device they need to use the Internet of Things. This tool provides an advanced, visual versioning interface for connecting and controlling interactions between devices and web services, so you can quickly build IoT applications. For example, a commercial agricultural program can define interactions between humidity sensors and temperature sensors and fog cloud weather data for automated irrigation. It represents tools and services that use pre-built, reusable components called models, hiding sub-details such as protocols and interfaces, and combining them into complex working processes.

AWS IoT solutions

AWS IoT Solution Repository

There are billions of devices in homes, factories, oil wells, hospitals, cars, and thousands of other places. As devices grow, more solutions are needed to connect devices and collect, store, and analyze device data. AWS IoT provides the preconfigured solutions, tutorials, and reference architectures in the Solution Repository to get you started with the most popular IoT applications across industries right away.

AWS IoT for the Edge

Building a successful IoT solution requires tens of billions of devices installed in factory homes and offices, oil fields and fields, airplanes, ships, and automobiles. AWS IoT services allow you to act intelligently by leveraging data generated by IoT Edge devices. AWS offers a variety of high-end device services. AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS to high-end devices, enabling you to use the cloud for ongoing management, analytics, and storage while working with locally generated data. FreeRTOS is an open-source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that facilitates programming, implementation, security, connectivity, and management of small, low-power devices. AWS IoT Device Tester is an IoT device test automation tool that you can use to verify that your device is running FreeRTOS or AWS IoT Greengrass and communicating with AWS IoT services.

Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial IoT (IIoT) connects machines, cloud computing, analytics, and people to improve the performance and efficiency of industrial processes. With IIoT, manufacturing companies are digitizing their processes, shaping companies in transition, improving performance and productivity, and costly companies operating in a variety of industries such as manufacturing, energy, and agriculture. Transportation and facilities participating in IoT projects connect billions of devices. It is used in a variety of applications such as quality forecasting, maintenance analysis, asset monitoring, and process optimization

AWS IoT for the Connected Home

As the use of connected home devices continues to grow, more and more data is moving to the cloud as the latest IoT and machine learning technologies bring new innovations to connected home applications. AWS IoT keeps you away from maintaining a necessary infrastructure to collect, process, analyze, and respond to data generated that can be used by connected home devices. This allows us to focus on developing solutions and experiences that add value to both your business and customers and create a new class of connected home applications that interact with the real world.

AWS IoT and Amazon Alexa

AWS IoT allows you to create connected home products quickly and easily at a low cost. To further enhance the customer experience, you can easily integrate connected products with Alexa and allow customers to control their devices with voice commands. The Alexa Voice Services integration for AWS IoT Core enables Alexa Voice to be used across all types of paired devices in a cost-effective way.

AWS IoT — Migrations

Whatever you use, AWS makes your migration faster and easier. As the IoT industry continues to evolve and bring new innovations to IoT, customers will have the opportunity to create architectures and operating systems. You can improve connectivity and enable IoT devices. AWS has also helped customers such as LG, Traeger Grills, Belkin, Centrica Hive, and Weissbeerger make the faster and easier transition from IoT systems or third-party platforms. These customers migrate to take advantage of the security, scalability, reliability, breadth, and depth of AWS IoT services.

This post is to share an overview of IoT with AWS cloud technologies and wake you up to see some extra features that legacy IoT platforms do not provide. We have covered lots of stuff today and hope you grab some knowledge on AWS IoT through the post. If you have any questions about the AWS IoT or any suggestions that you want to make, please feel free to comment in the comment section below. We will meet you again with this kind of useful topic. Stay tuned!

References

https://aws.amazon.com/iot/?nc=sn&loc=0

Originally published at https://www.agnasarp.com on June 9, 2021.

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Agnasarp

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