Amazon Rolls Out AWS IoT

IoT_Research-Findings.jpgAmazon has made a major move in the connected home space with the announcement of AWS IoT, a new platform from its Amazon Web Services division designed to make it easy for anything from a light bulb to a turbine to connect to AWS services so that companies can store, process, analyze, and act on the volumes of data generated by connected devices on a global scale.

Devices connect to AWS IoT’s Device Gateway, and manufacturers can set rules for how AWS IoT handles the data they send, and the actions they take when various conditions are met (such as sending an alert when a pressure sensor reports an unusually high reading or a motion detector is triggered).

Connected devices are usually operated via applications that communicate with them using APIs, but since devices may not always be available to respond to API calls because of connectivity dropouts or power constraints. AWS IoT creates a virtual version, or “shadow” of each connected device that includes all of the information about the device’s state and is always available. This enables the applications to check the device’s status and take actions that are automatically sent to the device once it reconnects.

AWS IoT provides an SDK that enables developers to use the AWS IoT functionality from connected devices, and from mobile and web apps. A number of semiconductor manufacturers also have “Starter Kits” Powered by AWS IoT that embed the AWS IoT Device SDK and offer connectivity to AWS IoT out of the box. These two factors should make it easier for developers less experience in developing for the IoT to produce solutions.

“The promise of the Internet of Things is to make everyday products smarter for consumers, and for businesses to enable better, data-driven offerings that weren’t possible before,” said Marco Argenti, vice president, Mobile and IoT at AWS. “World-leading organizations like Philips, NASA JPL, and Sonos already use AWS services to support the back-end of their IoT applications. Now, AWS IoT enables a whole ecosystem of manufacturers, service providers, and application developers to easily connect their products to the cloud at scale, take action on the data they collect, and create a new class of applications that interact with the physical world.”