Choosing an AWS IoT service

To properly consider the issues of scale, reliability and quality of service on AWS IoT, it's important to know that the AWS global infrastructure is built around AWS Regions and Availability Zones.

AWS Regions provide multiple physically separated and isolated Availability Zones, which are connected with low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. With Availability Zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically fail over between zones without interruption. Availability Zones are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than traditional single or multiple data center infrastructures.

To ensure availability in the event of a disruption, AWS IoT operates across multiple Availability Zones. In terms of the scale, reliability and quality of service attributes of specific AWS services, here are some useful things to know:

• AWS IoT Core provides fully managed MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport)-based messaging features, which can help you build adaptive IoT architectures It also provides native support for a managed MQTT broker that supports persistent, always-on connections, advanced message retention policies, and handles millions of devices and topics simultaneously. AWS IoT and the AWS IoT Device SDKs support the MQTT Quality of Service (QoS) levels 0 and 1.
• AWS IoT Greengrass offers several features to help support data resiliency and backup needs with features which allow devices to communicate over the local network even after loss in internet connectivity, allowing the core to receive messages sent while the core is offline and using stream manager to process data locally until the connection is restored and send data to cloud or local storage destinations
• AWS IoT Device Management enables you to update devices in the field while using Amazon S3 to version all firmware, software, and update manifests for devices.
• AWS CloudFormation lets you document your IoT infrastructure as code and provision cloud resources using a CloudFormation template.

From initial deployment to eventual retirement, your IoT devices have a finite lifespan. They need to be managed effectively, reliably, and securely during that lifespan if they're going to help you achieve your business outcomes.

How you tackle IoT product lifecycle management (PLM) is important in considering the AWS IoT services you will need. Services such as AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Management, and AWS IoT Device Defender all provide important pieces of lifecycle management (as detailed in this blog post).

In many IoT scenarios, you're working with devices that might rely on an edge computing model – and you need services that support running workloads at the edge.

A great example of this is AWS IoT Greengrass. It’s an open source IoT edge runtime and cloud service that helps you build, deploy, and manage IoT applications on your devices.

You can use it to build software that enables your devices to act locally on the data that they generate, run predictions based on ML models, and filter and aggregate device data. It enables your devices to collect and analyze data closer to where that data is generated, react autonomously to local events, and communicate securely with other devices on the local network. Similarly, AWS IoT ExpressLink powers a range of connectivity modules developed and offered by AWS Partners. These modules include software implementing AWS mandated security requirements, making it faster and easier for you to securely connect devices to the cloud and seamlessly integrate with a range of AWS services.

Meanwhile, AWS IoT SiteWise Edge brings features of AWS IoT SiteWise in the cloud to the factory premises. Specifically, you can now use asset models defined in the cloud service to process data in the SiteWise gateway locally, and visualize equipment data using local SiteWise Monitor dashboards served from the SiteWise gateway.

AWS IoT Device SDKs are also a great resource for edge support. They include open-source libraries, developer guides with samples, and porting guides.

Finally, take a look at the AWS Well-Architected Framework IoT Lens, which offers further guidance in how you might think about the edge layer in IoT systems and what you need to support it.

A digital twin is a live digital representation of a system and all of its physical and digital components. It is dynamically updated with data to mimic the true structure, state, and behavior of the system. 

The AWS IoT service that provides digital twin capabilities is AWS IoT TwinMaker. You can use it to build operational digital twins of physical and digital systems. 

It creates digital visualizations using measurements and analysis from a variety of real-world sensors, cameras, and enterprise applications to help you keep track of your physical factory, building, or industrial plant. You can use this real-world data to monitor operations, diagnose and correct errors, and optimize operations.

To develop an IoT solution, you will likely need to structure your work into multiple phases, from proof of concept (PoC) to production and scale. You will start getting benefits from IoT sooner if you use the right tools to prepare for your PoC, and prove the value of what you are developing to get whatever support is needed for broader implementation. The AWS tools you can use for this acceleration include:

• AWS IoT Device Advisor – This tool provides a cloud-based, fully managed test capability for validating IoT devices during device software development. It includes pre-built tests that you can use to validate IoT devices for reliable and secure connectivity with AWS IoT Core, before deploying devices to production.
• AWS IoT Device SDKs - These include open-source libraries, developer guides with samples, and porting guides so that you can build IoT products or solutions on your choice of hardware platforms.
• AWS IoT Device Client - It provides code to help your device connect to AWS IoT, perform fleet provisioning tasks, support device security policies, connect using secure tunneling, and process jobs on your device.
• AWS IoT Sensors (IoS app) – Use this tool to visualize sensor data from your device with 1-click.

IoT implementations increasingly have video as a key data source. Those sources can include everything from smartphones, security cameras, and webcams, to drones and cameras embedded in cars. In industrial settings, video inputs have become a critical component for automating defect detection sequences on the production line. Here are a couple of the AWS IoT services you may consider to manage and make effective use of video inputs:

• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams – You can use this fully managed AWS service to stream live video from devices to the AWS Cloud, or build applications for real-time video processing or batch-oriented video analytics. You can also use it to capture massive amounts of live video data from millions of sources, including smartphones, security cameras, webcams, cameras embedded in cars, drones, and other sources. In addition, you can use it to send non-video, time-serialized data such as audio data, thermal imagery, depth data, and RADAR data. As live video streams from these sources into a Kinesis video stream, you can build applications to access the data, frame-by-frame, in real time for low-latency processing.
• AWS IoT FleetWise vision system data – Announced in preview at re:Invent 2023, AWS IoT FleetWise supports vehicle vision system data collection that lets you collect metadata, object list and detection data, and images or videos from camera, lidar, radar and other vision sub-systems.

It should go without saying that security is a vital component of any IoT implementation. It's important for any IoT service to ensure that all elements of an IoT connection are encrypted and incorporate security best practices, whether it is handling data at the edge or in transit to the cloud.

All traffic to and from AWS IoT, for example, is sent securely over Transport Layer Security (TLS). AWS cloud security mechanisms protect data as it moves between AWS IoT and other AWS services. AWS IoT services address every layer of your application and device security.

You can safeguard your device data with preventative mechanisms, like encryption and access control, and consistently audit and monitor your configurations with AWS IoT Device Defender. It allows you to proactively assess the cloud configuration of your IoT device fleet, provide ongoing monitoring of device activities via rule-based and ML-based capabilities, and trigger alarms when an audit violation or behavior anomaly is identified.