Posted On: Dec 22, 2022

AWS IoT Core announces the capability to decode Google Protocol Buffer (Protobuf) encoded messages to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format using the AWS IoT Core Rules Engine, making it easier to use Protobuf directly in your IoT Rule, without the need to invoke a Lambda function to decode the Protobuf message.

Protobuf is Google's language and platform neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Protobuf is a popular messaging format among IoT customers in industries like fintech, automotive, and telecommunications, because of its ability to efficiently encode device messaging payloads with low overhead and little CPU usage. AWS IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows you to connect billions of IoT devices to AWS cloud without provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure. Rules Engine is a feature in AWS IoT Core that allows you to filter, decode, and process IoT device data and route the data to 15+ AWS and third-party services. 

To get started, create and upload a Protobuf descriptor file to one of your S3 buckets. The descriptor file contains the schema-transformation from Protobuf to JSON. You can then ingest Protobuf encoded data from IoT devices and decode the data to JSON format using decode function in AWS IoT Core’s Rules Engine before routing the data to different AWS and third-party services.

Protobuf to JSON decode capability is available in all Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where AWS IoT Core is available. These Regions are US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Middle East (UAE), South America (Sao Paulo), and AWS US GovCloud (US-East & US-West). For more information, refer developer guide and pricing page.