Understand the differences and pick the one that's right for you
|
Purpose |
Help determine which AWS IoT services are the best fit for your organization. |
|
|
Last updated |
June 28, 2024 |
|
|
Covered services |
Foundational services |
Use case or industry-specific services |
|
Device and design Connect, manage and monitor Analyze and act Design and validate |
Smart manufacturing Connected vehicles Public infrastructure |
|
Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become a transformative force in the business world. They offer a wide range of opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and customer-centric strategies. IoT provides the foundation for smart devices, smart homes, smart buildings, next-generation vehicles, smart manufacturing, and public infrastructure. Businesses can use IoT technologies to increase efficiency with automation, gain visibility into their supply chains, get insights from their data, and offer smart connected experiences for their customers.
AWS offers a variety of purpose-built IoT services. The foundational services help you to design and simplify complex IoT tasks. These services provide device-to-cloud connectivity, secure data ingestion, data processing, analytics, and the ability to run machine learning (ML) inferences on the edge. In addition, AWS offers IoT services that are designed for particular industries or use cases, including smart manufacturing, connected vehicles, and public infrastructure.
This decision guide will help you ask the right questions, evaluate your criteria, and determine which IoT services are the best fit for your needs.
This video provides a seven minute introduction to choosing an AWS IoT service.
Understand
IoT is sometimes described as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds.
It is a network of connected devices and sensors that communicate with each other and the cloud. These devices and sensors (sometimes called things) collect data from a very broad range of sources.
The devices collect data from sources that are connected to home appliances, buildings, machines, vehicles, hardware, factory production lines, pipelines, and connected people (for example, people wearing smart, connected devices for monitoring their health and fitness).
IoT services are designed to help you:
Securely connect your IoT devices to the cloud.
Process the data locally on the devices.
Securely capture and ingest data in the cloud for additional processing or for added intelligence.
Manage structured and unstructured data, such as video streams.
Analyze that data and enrich it further using analytics and machine learning services to generate actionable insights.
Develop plans that you can act on (such as exercise recommendations for individuals, or predictive machine maintenance strategies for industrial assets or fleets of vehicles).
Perform remote over-the-air updates to keep your devices and systems up to date.
Scale your operations from an initial set of devices up to billions globally, while achieving higher reliability, quality of service, and availability.
Monitor your organization’s security posture across your entire device fleet.
When asking how AWS IoT services can be useful to your organization, it's important to think about how these services are organized.
If you think about these services as a stack, as shown in the previous image, the foundational AWS Cloud services you need are at the base. These include services that provide compute, storage, database, containers, system management, networking management, and security. These services can also provide the analytics, ML, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities required to make the most of the insights you get from your IoT data.
Moving up the stack, you see a range of purpose-built IoT services (including industry-specific services) and IoT solutions from both AWS and AWS Partners.
Generative AI and IoT
While IoT-specific generative AI is still evolving, we see two broad categories of use cases:
Use cases that help IoT solution developers build more capable solutions faster and with higher quality.
Use cases that help end users naturally interact with IoT devices to generate recommendations and insights from their data.
There are a wide range of possibilities when you connect a vast amount of IoT data with generative AI technology. Your initial focus, however, is likely to be on tangible use cases where you can find value today.
For example, developers can provide a description of the application function with details about an IoT circuit board and sensors. Then, a generative AI-powered function can produce prototype code with associated infrastructure as code (IaC) and installation steps. It can also provide generic prototype code for one type of board and automatically convert it to working code for another.
Consider also this sample app
Further, generative AI models can create infrastructure code (such as AWS CloudFormation templates) that define asset models in AWS IoT SiteWise, device metadata in AWS IoT Device Management, and other associated AWS infrastructure.
This can reduce proof of concept (PoC) development time and lower the barrier of entry to create customized AWS solutions. You can then use generative AI models to audit environments and provide recommendations to save on costs and improve your organization's security posture.
Finally, you can synthetically create realistic and unidentifiable user data to comprehensively test IoT applications with a small sample of data and description of user behavior. This can help you to test unforeseen edge cases. This testing results in better products, accelerated release cycles, and fewer production issues.
Consider
Here are some of the key criteria to consider when you’re choosing which IoT services are the best fit for your organization.
Business outcome
Start by articulating the problem that you want to solve, along with the desired business outcome that will result from solving that problem. AWS offers a number of purpose-built services that are specific in what they can provide to help you get to the business outcome you want.
For example, you might run a logistics company and use robots in your warehouses to automate the movement of packages within the facility. To reduce downtime, it’s important to be able to quickly get reports of a malfunction and react right away. It’s even better to reliably get data that signals a potential upcoming malfunction. An AWS monitoring service such as AWS IoT Events is designed specifically with that kind of scenario in mind. Similarly, AWS IoT SiteWise is designed to help you analyze and get value from the vast amount of data coming in from your connected sites (where you might be receiving data from industrial sites and equipment).
Choose
Now that you know the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate your IoT service options, you're ready to choose which services might be a good fit.
Use the following table to help determine the services that are the best fit for your organization and use case.
These services are foundational to the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions on AWS.
|
What is it optimized for? |
Service |
|---|---|
|
Device and design AWS IoT device software services are optimized to:
|
|
|
Connect, manage, and monitor AWS connectivity, control, and monitoring services are optimized to:
|
|
|
Analyze and act AWS IoT Analytics services are optimized to:
|
|
|
Validate These tools help you validate your designs. |
Use
To get started with the AWS IoT services, we have provided a pathway to explore each service. The following sections provide links to in-depth documentation, hands-on tutorials, and resources.
The first section provides links to resources for the key foundational IoT services: FreeRTOS, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT ExpressLink, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Defender, AWS IoT Device Management, AWS IoT Events, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, and AWS IoT Analytics.
-
What is FreeRTOS?
Learn about the microcontroller operating system that makes small, low-powered edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, and maintain.
-
AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS
Use AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS to qualify data throughput rate with the FreeRTOS operating system.
-
FreeRTOS Porting Guide
Port FreeRTOS to a microcontroller platform.
This section links to resources about use case or industry-specific AWS IoT services, including AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT TwinMaker, and AWS IoT FleetWise.
-
What is AWS IoT SiteWise?
Use AWS IoT SiteWise to collect, model, analyze, and visualize data from industrial equipment at scale.
-
AWS IoT SiteWise pricing guide
Learn how AWS IoT SiteWise pricing works—with separate charges for usage of Messaging, Data Processing, Data Storage, Data Export, AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor, AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, and Alarms.
-
AWS IoT SiteWise FAQs
Learn about where, how, when and why you might use AWS IoT SiteWise.
Explore
-
Architecture diagrams
Explore reference architecture diagrams to help you develop your IoT solutions on AWS.
-
Whitepapers
Explore whitepapers to help you get started, learn best practices, and understand your IoT options.
-
AWS videos
Explore videos that will help you better use and understand the available AWS IoT services.
