The Internet of Things on AWS – Official Blog

Build an AWS IoT Well-Architected environment with the IoT Lens

There are an estimated 31 billion IoT devices in 2020, and this is expected to increase to 75 billion by 2025 according to Security Today. You may be starting on your IoT journey or have hundreds of thousands of devices connected and want to improve your architecture and reduce your cost. To guide you through this process, AWS is happy to announce the IoT Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework. AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. This post provides an introduction of the purpose of the IoT Lens, topics covered, common scenarios, and AWS services included.

The new IoT Lens offers comprehensive guidance to make sure your IoT devices and cloud framework are designed in accordance with AWS best practices. The goal is to give you a consistent way to design and evaluate IoT devices and associated cloud architectures, based on the following five pillars:

  1. Operational Excellence
  2. Security
  3. Reliability
  4. Performance Efficiency
  5. Cost Optimization

The IoT Lens can help you assess the IoT device software and workloads you have deployed in AWS by identifying potential risks and offering suggestions for improvements.

Using the IoT Lens to address common requirements

The IoT Lens addresses the following on the device end:

  1. Securing devices and credentials
  2. Accessing IoT devices
  3. Provisioning IoT devices
  4. Upgrading configuration, credentials and firmware on IoT devices

The IoT Lens covers the data flow from/to the devices:

  1. Encrypting data from / to devices
  2. Controlling the frequency of message flow from cloud to the device
  3. Optimizing the data ingestion from the device

The IoT Lens also addresses architecting the cloud to:

  1. Analyzing and monitoring device metrics to improve device performance
  2. Designing reliable and cost optimized storage of device data in the cloud
  3. Scaling your IoT workloads as the number of devices increase

Diagram showingthe IoT Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework

In addition to the above, the IoT Lens addresses Disaster Recovery for your IoT workloads, which is crucial to ensure that your devices are always connected to the cloud.

The IoT Lens can be used to start your IoT journey whether you are looking for telemetry data from your devices or Command and Control of your devices. You can use the IoT Lens to improve your architecture by incorporating features such as device management, security, configuration, over-the-air (OTA) Updates, and redundancy in device connections to the cloud. If you already have an IoT workload, the IoT Lens can be used to scale your workload and operate it efficiently.

Conclusion

Applying the IoT Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework to your architecture can validate the stability and efficiency of your design (or provide recommendations to address the gaps that are identified). AWS is committed to the IoT Lens as a living tool; as new AWS services become generally available, we’ll update the IoT Lens appropriately. Our mission will always be to help you design and deploy well-architected applications so that you can focus on delivering on your business objectives.

AWS also maintains the IoT Atlas which can be used as a resource for AWS IoT best practices.

Special thanks to the extended AWS Solution Architecture team who contributed, reviewed and implemented the IoT Lens.

Are there questions you’d like to see answered in the tool? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments.