AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 provides an open source edge runtime and new capabilities for building and operating IoT device software

Posted on: Dec 15, 2020

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 is now available. With this major release, AWS IoT Greengrass provides an open source edge runtime, a rich set of pre-built software components, tools for local software development, and new features for managing device software on large fleets of devices.

The AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 open source edge runtime is now distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and available on GitHub. You can now inspect the AWS IoT Greengrass edge runtime code, which allows you to more easily troubleshoot interactions with your application and helps you build more reliable and performant applications running on AWS IoT Greengrass. You can also customize and extend the AWS IoT Greengrass edge runtime to meet your specific hardware and software needs.

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 is completely modular. You can add or remove pre-built software components based on your IoT use case, and your device CPU and memory resources. For example, you can choose to include pre-built AWS IoT Greengrass components such as stream manager only when you need to process data streams with your application, or machine learning components only when you want to perform machine learning inference locally on your devices.

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 includes a new command-line interface (CLI) that allows you to locally develop and debug applications on your device. In addition, there is a new local debug console that helps you visually debug applications on your device. With these new capabilities, you can rapidly develop and debug code on a test device before using the cloud to deploy to your production devices.

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 is integrated with AWS IoT thing groups, enabling you to easily organize your devices in groups and manage application deployments across your devices with features that control rollout rates, timeouts, and rollbacks. For example, a smart thermostat manufacturer can deploy their latest application to millions of users at once, or deploy in stages by choosing only a percentage of their entire fleet. In addition, they have the option to stop deployments in case of timeouts, or roll back deployments in case of a failure, thus removing the burden of managing this effort on their own.  

Starting today, to help you evaluate, test, and develop with this new release of AWS IoT Greengrass, the first 1,000 devices in your account will not incur any AWS IoT Greengrass charges until December 31, 2021. You will still incur charges for other AWS services you use with your applications running on AWS IoT Greengrass such as AWS IoT Core.

Please see the AWS Region table for all the regions where AWS IoT Greengrass is available. For more information about AWS IoT Greengrass, visit our product page.

See our blog post and developer guide to learn more.