AWS Greengrass – Ubiquitous, Real-World Computing

Computing and data processing within the confines of a data center or office is easy. You can generally count on good connectivity and a steady supply of electricity, and you have access to as much on-premises or cloud-based storage and compute power as you need. The situation is much different out in the real world. Connectivity can be intermittent, unreliable, and limited in speed and scale. Power is at a premium, putting limits on how much storage and compute power can be brought in to play.

Lots of interesting and potentially valuable data is present out in the field, if only it could be collected, processed, and turned into actionable intelligence. This data could be located miles below the surface of the Earth in a mine or an oil well, in a sensitive & safety-critical location like a hospital or a factory, or even on another planet (hello, Curiosity).

Our customers are asking for a way to use the scale and power of the AWS Cloud to help them to do local processing under these trying conditions. First, they want to build systems that measure, sense, and act upon the data locally. Then they want to bring cloud-like, local intelligence to bear on the data, implementing local actions that are interdependent and coordinated. To make this even more challenging they want to make use of any available local processing and storage resources, while also connecting to specialized sensors and peripherals.

Introducing AWS Greengrass
I’d like to tell you about AWS IoT Greengrass. This new service is designed to allow you to address the challenges that I outlined above by extending the AWS programming model to small, simple, field-based devices.

IoT Greengrass builds on AWS IoT Core and AWS Lambda, and can also access other AWS services. it is built for offline operation and greatly simplifies the implementation of local processing. Code running in the field can collect, filter, and aggregate freshly collected data and then push it up to the cloud for long-term storage and further aggregation. Further, code running in the field can also take action very quickly, even in cases where connectivity to the cloud is temporarily unavailable.

If you are already developing embedded systems for small devices, you will now be able to make use of modern, cloud-aware development tools and workflows. You can write and test your code in the cloud and then deploy it locally. You can write Python code that responds to device events and you can make use of MQTT-based pub/sub messaging for communication.

IoT Greengrass has two constituent parts, the Greengrass Core (GGC) and the IoT Device SDK. Both of these components run on your own hardware, out in the field.

Greengrass Core is designed to run on devices that have at least 128 MB of memory and an x86 or ARM CPU running at 1 GHz or better, and can take advantage of additional resources if available. It runs Lambda functions locally, interacts with the AWS Cloud, manages security & authentication, and communicates with the other devices under its purview.

The IoT Device SDK is used to build the applications that run on the devices that connect to the device that hosts the core (generally via a LAN or other local connection). These applications will capture data from sensors, subscribe to MQTT topics, and use AWS IoT device shadows to store and retrieve state information.

Using AWS GreenGrass
You will be able to set up and manage many aspects of IoT Greengrass through the AWS Management Console, the AWS APIs, and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

You will be able to register new hub devices, configure the desired set of Lambda functions, and create a deployment package for delivery to the device. From there, you will associate the lightweight devices with the hub.

Now in Preview
We are launching a limited preview of AWS IoT Greengrass today and you can sign up now if you would like to participate.

Each AWS customer will be able to use up 3 devices for one year at no charge. Beyond that, the monthly cost for each active Greengrass Core is $0.16 ($1.49 per year) for up to 10,000 devices.

We have a webinar for you if you’d like to learn more. It is on January 19th and you can sign up for it here.

— Jeff;