Skip to main content

AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Managing Agriculture Assets Using AWS Connected Device Framework

Overview

This Guidance helps agricultural companies obtain advanced analytics from connected assets and streamlines management of connected assets with custom relationships. Agricultural companies include companies that manufacture sensors and control systems on a variety of equipment including tractors, ethanol and bio-fuel production factories, soil probes, and more. AWS Connected Device Framework (CDF) and the CDF Asset Library can help agricultural companies manage connected agricultural equipment for more efficient and secure asset management that enhances device functionality and performance.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

Amazon CloudWatch metrics allow you to monitor the state of API Gateway, Lambda functions, and the Neptune database. Using dashboards with CloudWatch, you can validate that the provisioning workflow, API, and Asset Library are all functioning correctly and within normal limits. You can establish AWS IoT Rules to report on devices experiencing issues to CloudWatch.

Additionally, AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodePipeline enable consistent delivery across different environments. Well-defined continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes also help ensure consistent delivery of changes to the API or Asset Library.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

AWS IoT Core provides features to manage device security and certificates and to publish alerts in case a device exhibits behavior indicative of an issue through AWS IoT Device Management. Amazon Cognito enables granular access to APIs and asset data by maintaining and validating appropriate claims. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) security groups enable network isolation of asset data stored in Neptune.

Read the Security whitepaper 

The AWS IoT Device SDK has built-in functionality to support non-client-side disconnect and queuing of plain Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) operations in case of network failure. Lambda has built-in failure logic to automatically retry failed operations and a dead-letter queue (DLQ) capability to push failed operations to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

Neptune can store an unlimited amount of edges and vertices. By using serverless compute nodes, Neptune can also automatically adjust to query demand. Through Lambda, all compute in this Guidance is stateless and relies on Neptune to persist the system state.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

By using AWS IoT Core, Lambda and Neptune, the Guidance can scale up to handle the concurrent processing of potentially thousands of requests or scale down when there are no pending calls to process.

Additionally, Neptune is purpose-built for farm ontology (FO), which is graphical in nature, with each asset being related to many other assets. We use AWS IoT Core in this Guidance for device connectivity and data ingestion that can easily scale to a hundred thousand devices and millions of messages a month.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

Neptune allows you to choose storage as standard and I/O-optimized to reduce cost for I/O intensive workloads. Neptune also uses compute nodes on demand and flexibility in storage and compute pricing models, providing an optimized cost and performance ratio for graphical data.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

Lambda and Neptune with serverless nodes reduce wasted compute cycles by enabling you to use compute only as needed, so you can provision the exact amount of compute needed at any given moment. Since Lambda and Amazon Neptune Serverless are managed services, they leverage shared compute resources and variable demand to reduce overall compute capacity. This helps minimize the environmental impact of the Guidance workload.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.