Amazon Web Services – Key IOT Products

This article is intended to give you a brief overview of the key IoT products provided by Amazon Web Services(AWS). There are 3 key categories of IoT products on AWS namely:

1. Devices Software: It includes services such as the FreeRTOS and AWS IoT Greengrass, etc.
2. Connectivity & Control Services: It includes services like AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Defender & AWS IoT Device Management, etc.
3. Analytics Services: It includes services such as AWS IoT Events, AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT SiteWise & AWS IoT ThingsGraph, etc.

Now let’s get an overview of each category and the IoT products associated with them.

1. Device Software

Device Software is used to connect your devices and operate them at the edge.

FreeRTOS: It is an open-source real-time operating system for embedded systems that can be used in IoT. It is suitable for programming low-power systems, their deployment, security, and connection. It is open and freely available under MIT open source license. It comes with a kernel and set of suitable libraries which we would need for different sectors. Using Amazon FreeRTOS we can connect the low power devices with the cloud’s powerful services. Free RTOS can be easily reused and has high reliability. It comes with the features like microcontrollers support, FreeRTOS console, secure connection of devices, connectivity with cloud, etc.

AWS IoT Greengrass: AWS IoT Greengrass is an open-source runtime for IoT edge devices and cloud services. It is widely used by people in homes, factories, vehicles, and businesses. We can easily build intelligent device software on IoT Greengrass. It comes with features like local processing, messaging, data management, and other Machine learning interfaces. It also allows us to remotely manage the devices. It also makes the device smarter over time by keeping it up-to-date.

2. Connectivity & Control Services

These services are used to secure, control, and manage your devices from the cloud.

AWS IoT Core: AWS IOT core enables the IoT devices to securely and easily communicate with the cloud. It can support up to billion devices easily. It can also process trillions of messages at once and send them to suitable endpoints. It mainly helps devices that use protocols like MQTT over WSS to publish their messages.

AWS IoT Device Defender: AWS IOT device defender is mainly used to secure a group of IoT devices. It is responsible for the safety of IoT devices. It enforces the safety measures such as identity, authentication, authorization of devices, and encryption of the device’s data.

AWS IoT Device Management: AWS IoT Device Management mainly helps in monitoring and tracking IoT devices. It is very much useful for the management of IoT devices. Using this we can remotely monitor the health of each device, problems with the devices, and necessary steps to be taken. The important benefit is that we can overlook the status of the fleet of devices all at once.

3. Analytics Services

The Analytics Services are used to work with IoT data faster to extract value from your data.

AWS IoT Events: As the name indicates AWS IOT Events helps the user to watch over the devices by the events or notifications it sends. Its events are sent when an error occurs or when any actions need to be triggered. Using this we can build complex monitoring services for our IoT products. The major benefits of AWS IOT events include getting inputs from multiple sources, Usage of simple logical expressions to recognize complex cases of events, Triggering actions based on the events, Automatically scaling the system to meet the IoT fleet’s demands.

AWS IoT Analytics: AWS IOT Analytics mainly analyzes and scales the IoT data. It easily supports up to petabytes of IoT data. So it is highly efficient. It eliminates the need to manage complex IoT infrastructure and helps in building fast and responsive IoT applications. It can be used to operate huge volumes of IoT data without needing to worry about the infrastructure needed for its processing. Since IoT data is highly unstructured and susceptible to false readings it is necessary to preprocess and analyze it properly for accurate and better results it can be done by AWS IOT analytics.

AWS IoT SiteWise: AWS IoT Sitewise allows us to collect, model, and analyze the data from the industrial IOT devices which are at scale. We can also gain insights into industrial operations by configuring the suitable metrics using AWS IOT Sitewise. We can also effectively process the data on the local devices with IoT Sitewise Edge. Some benefits of it include, it collects the data from all the sources consistently, even identifies remote issues with quick monitoring, improving the cross-facility process with a central data source, process and monitoring the data on-premises for better shop floor applications.

AWS IoT ThingsGraph: AWS IoT Things Graph is used to connect web services and other different devices visually for building IoT applications. It provides a drag and drop interface which makes it easy for us to build IoT applications easily by connecting devices and web services quickly. Some of the benefits of the IoT things graph include allowing us to build IoT applications faster, can easily create sophisticated workflows, very easily monitoring and managing the devices.