AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon announces a variety of AWS IoT releases

At the AWS re:Invent 2018 event yesterday, Amazon announced a variety of IoT related AWS releases.

Three new AWS IoT Service Delivery Designations at AWS re:Invent 2018

The AWS Service Delivery Program helps customers find and select top APN Partners who have a track record of delivering specific AWS services. The APN partners undergo a service delivery expertise related technical validation in order to get an AWS Service Delivery designation. Three new AWS IoT Service Delivery Designations are now added—AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, and AWS IoT Analytics.

AWS IoT Things Graph

AWS IoT Things Graph provides an easy way for developers to connect different devices and web services in order to build IoT applications. Devices and web services are represented as reusable components called models. These models hide the low-level details and expose states, actions, and events of underlying devices and services as APIs. A drag-and-drop interface is available to connect the models visually and define interactions between them. This can build multi-step automation applications. When built, the application to your AWS IoT Greengrass-enabled device can be deployed with a few clicks.

Areas which it can be used are home automation, industrial automation, and energy management.

AWS IoT Greengrass has extended functionality

AWS IoT Greengrass allows bringing abilities like local compute, messaging, data caching, sync, and ML inference to edge devices. New features that extend the capabilities of AWS IoT Greengrass including can be used now:

Connectors to third-party applications and AWS services.

Hardware root of trust private key storage.

Isolation and permission configurations that increase the AWS IoT Greengrass Core configuration options.

The connectors allow you to easily build complex workflows on AWS IoT Greengrass even if you have no understanding of device protocols, managing credentials, or interacting with external APIs. Connections can be made without writing code.

The security is increased due to hardware root of trust private key storage on hardware secure elements. This includes Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). By storing your private key on a hardware secure element, a hardware root of trust level security is added to existing AWS IoT Greengrass security features that include X.509 certificates. This enables mutual TLS authentication and encryption of data regardless if they are transit or at rest. The hardware secure element can be used to protect secrets that were deployed to AWS IoT Greengrass device.

New configuration options allow deploying AWS IoT Greengrass to another container environment and directly access low-power devices like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices.

AWS IoT SiteWise, available in limited preview

AWS IoT SiteWise is a new service that simplifies collecting and organizing data from industrial equipment at scale. With this service, you can easily monitor equipment across industrial facilities to identify waste, production inefficiencies, and defects in products.

With IoT SiteWise, industrial data is stored securely, is available, and searchable in the cloud. IoT SiteWise can be integrated with industrial equipment via a gateway. The gateway then securely connects on-premises data servers to collect data and send it to the AWS Cloud.

AWS IoT SiteWise can be used in areas of manufacturing, food and beverage, energy, and utilities.

AWS IoT Events, available in preview

AWS IoT Events is a new IoT service that makes it easy to catch and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications. This service recognizes events across multiple sensors in order to identify operational issues like equipment slowdowns. It triggers alerts to notify support teams of an issue. This service offers a managed complex event detection service on the AWS cloud.

Detecting events across thousands of IoT sensors, like temperature, humidity is simple. System-wide event detection and responding with appropriate actions is easy and cost-effective with AWS IoT Events. Potential areas of use include manufacturing, oil, and gas, commercial and consumer products.

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