AWS wants to lower the bar of entry for all companies wanting to do IoT

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• Posted by Dan Swinhoe

• on March 13 2017

The Internet of Things will fundamentally change the world, and Amazon Web Service wants to be the main enabler to help companies get there.

Managing Internet of Things devices isn't a new cloud use case for Amazon Web Services, according to Ian Massingham, AWS Technical Evangelist, who was speaking at an AWS IoT workshop in London last week. Though he admitted Early IoT companies that adopted AWS - such as Tile, Phillips and Sonos - were using “primitive building blocks” such as EC2 instances and a lot self-managed and designed architecture created from AWS components.

But the company has seen 'an explosion in adoption' in its use since the launch of AWS IoT, a dedicated service which helps manage, update, and collect and act on data from connected devices. The event coincided with Amazon announcing its AWS IoT platform is now available within the company’s London datacentre.

Massingham promised that this new world of devices will enable new business models and efficiencies and will “fundamentally change the way people live their lives over the course of the next 5 to 10 to 15 years”, and AWS is looking to enable that for companies and “lower the entry bar for companies that aren’t necessarily IoT specialists” to create IoT initiatives.

“What we tried to focus on with this service was minimising the heavy lifting and unnecessary complexity; common challenges with building, deploying, scaling, and operating IoT applications, to unburden developers from the heavy lifting associated with those activities.”

Instead of primitive tools, AWS now provides IoT SDKs, security infrastructure to ensure authentication and authorisation, device shadowing (device status stores best used for intermittent connectivity), its Lambda “serverless, event-driven” processing service, and its edge computing Greengrass service which prevents unnecessary processing being pushed to the cloud.

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