Hitachi GLS builds large-scale platform to connect 6 million IoT home appliances to smartphones with AWS managed services

Hitachi GLS, as a core business entity of the Hitachi Group, is engaged in the development, manufacturing, and sales of home appliances and air conditioning equipment, as well as providing engineering and maintenance services. The company, positioning its IoT product business as a growth area, began offering Hitachi's "Connected Home Appliances®" in 2018, which connects smartphones with home appliances to provide new added value to users.

The platform providing the service was built and operated in a cloud environment in the form of IaaS. However, as the number of connected devices increased, it became increasingly difficult to manage, with frequent expansions of cloud resources being required. "We began to see system architecture issues emerge around the 100,000 device connection mark, raising concerns that cloud resource expansions alone would no longer be sufficient," says Mr. Atsushi Tachikawa, Chief Engineer of the IT Systems Division.

Therefore, the company considered building a new platform with an eye to 6 million units connections starting in the year of 2021.

The new platform considered a cloud environment in the form of PaaS and SaaS, taking into account the ease of resource scalability and other factors. AWS was selected based on considerations such as connectivity with shipped connected home appliances, compliance with security policies, the presence of premier partners, and proven adoption of IoT platforms by other companies in the industry.

“The decisive factor was connectivity with shipped products. While evaluating the each company's cloud, it was the AWS that showed high compatibility that can be used without changing the software of shipped products using the MQTT/HTTP protocol” (Mr. Tachikawa)

Meanwhile, verification was necessary to ensure the performance that could withstand 6 million connections. Therefore, we conducted performance checks using a Proof of Concept (PoC) before launching the development project. Specifically, we created a load tool likened to a home appliance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), launched 100 Amazon EC2 units to generate peak traffic, and measured processing performance to confirm that target performance was met. “Since the usage times for home appliances vary by product, we anticipated up to 2.2 million simultaneous connections and tested by transmitting 20,000 packets of data per second.” (Mr. Tachikawa)

After going through these evaluation phases, a full-scale development project began in August 2021. After architecture design, construction, testing, etc., we first started switching platforms from robot cleaners in June 2022. After that, we transitioned to the new platform with the release of new models such as washing machines, refrigerators, and microwave ovens, completing the migration in March 2023.

In terms of architecture design, the company is like AWS IoT Core, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, etc. We are actively adopting zid/serverless services, containerizing applications, and building execution environments on Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate. Furthermore, we built a CI/CD pipeline with the aim of responding to business needs in a short period of time.

“We got the tips from our partners and decided to adopt containers, and we also decided to reduce our operational load with managed services. The CI/CD pipeline is a technology that we had been paying attention to for a long time, and we were finally able to make it a reality.” (Mr. Tachikawa)

In this project, the IT Systems Division Digital System Development Department, which is in charge of development, has taken on a new challenge which is agile development efforts. Waterfall development has historically been a strong part of the home appliance development site, and this was the company's first attempt.

“Having been involved in software development for over 30 years, I've always been interested in agile development, but I haven't had the opportunity. This time, I also received recommendations from my partner, so I decided to practice agile and study. There were also suggestions from within the company that “can quality be guaranteed,” but they persuaded them that “we will create results first” (Mr. Tachikawa)

Specifically, multiple scrum teams composed of 4 to 8 people were in charge of development, and while clearing daily issues at daily meetings, they implemented the new features in a one-week sprint. Mr. Ryohei Nakatani, an engineer at the IT Systems Division Digital System Development Department, said, “The first month was full of getting used to it, but gradually I came to understand the advantages of agile development. I realized that agile development, where functions can be added by first releasing functions and referring to the voices of developers and users later, is an effective method even in the field of “manufacturing things.”