Whisker Delivers Richer Insights into Pet Wellness with Onica on AWS

The product development team at Whisker, the inventor of the WiFi-enabled Litter-Robot, was scaling quickly. The company needed a serverless solution to manage its connected devices and their events. Whisker also wanted a faster time to market and lower server operating overhead for its new Litter-Robot 4 product. After onboarding AWS Partner Onica and leveraging AWS, Whisker was able to process several million messages and events from its connected robots per day. Whisker now delivers some of the richest insights available in pet tech while scaling responsibly and accelerating prototype time.

As a leader in pet innovation, Whisker delivers smarter insights for pet parents while transforming pet care through beautiful solution-oriented pet tech innovations. Since 2015, there has been a meaningful surge in demand for its automated and Wi-Fi-enabled Litter Robot and Feeder-Robot for cats and dogs. To support a rapidly expanding customer base, Whisker needed to scale its operations so it could manage millions of daily messages and events from its connected devices. Whisker also wanted to accelerate prototyping and drive a faster time to market for its new Litter-Robot 4.

Whisker, through its collaboration with Onica, an AWS Partner designed and built onboarding and provisioning processes for its Litter-Robot 4 using AWS IoT Core to manage the devices and device security certificates. This allowed the devices to seamlessly communicate to the cloud.

Alongside the Whisker engineering organization, the Onica team refined Whisker’s over the-air (OTA) transmission to support the new device types so that each robot could receive updates from the cloud via AWS IoT Core. Over an encrypted transport layer, X.509 certificates secured the OTA communications. Onica also developed a new GraphQL command plane using AWS AppSync and AWS Lambda for the application to have bidirectional communication. Onica helped Whisker update and develop APIs for better command functionality. This changed the data model to include new information for the Litter-Robot 4.

Adarash Mishra, technical product manager at Whisker, elaborates on how a serverless infrastructure made a cost-efficient expansion possible: “With AWS and Onica, we could scale globally at a reasonable cost per robot as our fleet continues to grow.”

Credit: Whisker

The fully serverless solution eliminated the need for Whisker to manually manage its expanding fleet of connected devices. This enabled Whisker to remain lean and focused on its differentiated innovation that has solidified its position as a market leader, now with over 1 billion AWS Lambda function invocations per month and an average of 200 million messages from its connected robots per day. Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions and services transformed team productivity at Whisker, allowing the company to support more customer devices while cutting costs and labor.

Mishra speaks on the long-term value of this feat, “There's no way we could operate the number of robots we do globally if we weren't doing it in a serverless paradigm.”

Being serverless has improved customer service for its Internet of Things (IoT) devices by reducing response and resolution timeframes. The innovations enabled by AWS IoT Core and other AWS services support data and sensor analysis, as well as other capabilities that provide deeper insights into pet health and wellness.

AWS IoT Core enables real-time communication and seamless debugging of robots. Robots can send critical data to the Whisker team to guide repairs without disruption. Amazon Athena picks up debug data that allows firmware engineers at Whisker to analyze and identify potential faults and proactively issue firmware updates. The debug process pipes data into Amazon Timestream, enabling engineers to visualize that data in Amazon Managed Grafana. The Whisker team can build custom dashboards from sensor data to view its growing fleet and proactively, as well as reactively, identify any robots that would need support.

Amazon CloudWatch monitors and observes system performance to discern any alarms. It provides an actionable dashboard that supports site reliability while making it easier to trace actions to the Whisker platform. The company also leverages AWS IoT Device Defender to locate and limit the functionality of potentially stolen units.

Since 2019, Whisker has invested more than $13 million in infrastructure to support the expansion of its American operations, proudly based in Juneau, Wisconsin. It is now one the largest and highest paying employers in Juneau, creating more than 300 manufacturing jobs and adding new vitality to the state.

Mishra shares more on the expansion at Whisker, “Whisker’s cloud infrastructure scale is not something we need to think about frequently thanks to our partnership with AWS and Onica, which allows our engineering team to focus on new product innovation. The economy of scale we’ve been able to realize through our partnership with AWS has certainly benefited Whisker meaningfully as we’ve grown to our current size.” Whisker is excited to continue to support its category-defining innovations with Onica on AWS.