Scalable Architecture for the Internet of Things

Chapter 2. Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT

This chapter focuses on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT platform. We will provide an overview of the architecture and discuss steps for setting up the ecosystem, event management and system dashboards, the application integration layer, and security. We will conclude by building an end-to-end example.

Introduction to AWS IoT

AWS IoT is Amazon’s cloud-based IoT platform. Its main purpose is to gather data from a myriad of devices into the cloud for further processing in a scalable fashion. AWS IoT supports the following key use cases, as depicted in Figure 2-1:

Communicate

Enables devices to securely communicate with cloud applications and each other using HTTP or MQTT (directly, or via WebSocket) protocols. AWS IoT may act as a protocol bridge, so devices can talk to each other even if they don’t quack the same protocol. The communication is usually bidirectional; devices deliver their telemetry data into the cloud, and receive control commands from the cloud.

Execute Data Analytics

This is the core strength of AWS IoT, since data may be filtered, transformed, and acted upon using AWS’s scalable and rich set of services. AWS IoT may be interrelated with services, like Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Machine Learning, and AWS Lambda. More fine-tuned views can be implemented by leveraging Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. Such ...