Did Someone Say Beer?

By Jeremy Wallace, AWS Solutions Architect

The taps were flowing at the AWS Pop-up Lofts, where we turned AWS Loft customers into Simple Beer Service developers and unveiled the latest version of this technology.

Simple Beer Service (SBS), a cloud-connected kegerator that sends sensor data (beer flow, temperature, humidity, sound levels, and proximity) to AWS, has changed a lot since we first built it. The original version was a simple Python script that collected and published sensor data to an Amazon Kinesis stream. There is no upper limit to the number of shards you can have in an Amazon Kinesis stream, so we could collect a virtually unlimited amount of data. At the time it was a great pattern.

Now, the new system showcased at the AWS Lofts in New York and San Francisco publishes data collected by an Intel Edison module and Seeed Studio sensors to an AWS IoT device gateway. The AWS IoT rules engine is used to invoke downstream actions in AWS, such as publishing to an Amazon Kinesis Firehose stream or an Amazon DynamoDB table.

The data visualizations are delivered through a static web application dashboard that opens a web socket connection to the same AWS IoT topic, providing a near real-time display of the sensor data. The web application is stored in Amazon S3 and delivered through the AWS content delivery network, Amazon CloudFront.

Loft participants loved testing out the new system and getting hands-on with their own SBS development environment, and now you can too!

The code for the project is officially available on GitHub, complete with instructions on how to set up your own SBS unit. Clone it and start building today! https://github.com/awslabs/simplebeerservice/