So far, working with devices, security, networks and data collection for Internet of Things applications had been a tough task for online sellers and manufacturers. Indeed, there is an ecosystem comprised of mega cloud services companies (Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Rackspace), independent software vendors, SaaS vendors, professional services organisations and consultancies that enable an enterprise to have strategic and tactic access to specific technologies/services to solve business challenges.
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The organization firmly trusts that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the future stage of endeavors. If you do have experience in such things it may be fruitful to jump onto the new service now and poke around with the Beta, especially since there are free versions available. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels who spoke in the conference (above image) explained about the platform saying that it will have device registry, a rule-based engine, and a device gateway. TI tied the open AWS IoT Software Development Kit to SimpleLink so that developers can more quickly link up to AWS IoT services and speed up the development process on the platform. While headway has been made with marketing the concept and there is plenty of successful examples of siloed IoT deployments, there are still many unknowns; the elephant in the room being a lack of standardized frameworks and protocols. It can even read the state of a device that is disconnected because it stores the last read state, making the device online all the time, and also allows users to set a new device state and make it active when the device reconnects.
Too often, BI solutions require teams of data engineers to spend months building complex data models before ever generating a report, and these solutions lack interactive data exploration and visualization, limiting users to canned reports and pre-selected queries.
AWS is focusing on Amazon IoT and how to make it connected to other Amazon’s services such as S3, DynamoDB, Amazon Machine Learning and Lambda. This is a product for end-users and not just developers. It isn’t a surprising move, but one that is rattling the cages of the companies that is built on top of Amazon.
“On the surface, that seems to be the case, especially given Amazon’s aggressive pricing – $9 per user per month, which it claims is one-tenth the cost of other tools”, King said. The company is also focusing on Import/Export Snowball, which was the first hardware offered by the cloud service provider. It also connects to and is managed from the AWS IoT console.
The latest launch of new service is not an unexpected one. Amazon Web Services has a “pretty good” track record in this respect so it should work out for the company over time. This alerted other IT majors as well.
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Connections between cloud and devices are encrypted and use mutual authentication, and Amazon has opted to use HTTP and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for intercommunication rather than a proprietary standard.
