
AWS IoT Beta - jmgrosen
https://aws.amazon.com/iot/
======
jchrisa
It's important to highlight open source alternatives to AWS products. If you
are looking at AWS IoT and wishing you could run it on your own servers, the
Couchbase Mobile stack is open source and used for mission critical
deployments by customers like General Electric, for IoT applications:
[http://www.slideshare.net/Couchbase/offline-first-how-ge-
int...](http://www.slideshare.net/Couchbase/offline-first-how-ge-integrated-
couchbase-mobile-in-less-than-90-days-couchbase-connect-2015)

More info:
[http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile](http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile)

There is a lot going on in this space and we are a general purpose database.
If you're looking for native open source implementations that give you access
to the whole stack, and interop with other tech like PouchDB and IBM
Cloudant...

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harshaw
So, my extremely quick read is this a framework for hiding stuff that consumes
data from internet of thing appliances and makes some of that data available
via shadows.

I wish amazon would do a better job explaining why this new thing is better
than the last new thing from amazon. Many services feel close and similar
until you dig into the target use cases. Even the FAQ doesn't have a list of
target use cases.

~~~
marianov
An common architecture for IoT is to have sensors/actuators talking to a MQTT
server (a message queue). Then processing it with some rules or exposing it as
a REST API. This should enable all those things as SaaS. I guess the biggest
change is the MQTT server and a rules engine

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nbadg
I'm taking a 15-minute look at their IoT developer guide
([https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/what-i...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/what-
is-aws-iot.html)) to get a feel for what, exactly, this service is providing.
My guess is that they're trying to compete with Thingspeak, DeviceHub, etc.
I'm not totally sure I'm capturing this right, because their documentation
isn't great at "getting to the point", but here's my read:

1\. Internet-connected stuff needs to be able to talk, so awsiot needs to
support messaging. So it looks like they're currently offering http (publish
only) and mqtt (bidirectional pub/sub). They give each awsiot account a unique
IoT internet endpoint (some-random-string.iot.us-east-1.amazonaws.com), and
then parse everything into a stored state in the cloud (that's the device
"shadow")

2\. Ideally you'd be doing this securely. awsiot appears to be generating its
own x509 certs here, -- are they then an intermediate CA? Not clear on this.
The documentation here is terribly vague and I have no idea what's going on.
Not good for transparency. I can't even tell if they're forcing security, or
if it's optional.

3\. State management. awsiot cloud-stores the state of devices, allowing you
to check them (or to issue commands to either from a third-party device like a
phone app).

4\. Communication between devices. They're claiming some kind of wholly
undocumented authentication system for access to and control over device
state. At any rate, they have a concept of device-based identity, and then
based on that identity, devices are (or aren't) allowed to talk to each other.

I've done some IoT development, and though it's a bit hard to tell by their
terribly inadequate documentation, I'm pretty sure this is intended for
enterprise developers with massive IoT product offerings and very high product
volume. AWS is much too complicated for a lot of the small device
manufacturers, at least the ones coming in from the hardware side. To use this
scalably (especially given you can only access it from CLI) with reasonable
product volumes is going to require a lot of setup scripting to register
devices, and I don't think companies will be able to afford the tooling cost
until they're enterprise-level.

~~~
epalmer
I was at Reinvent last week and attended a few of the IoT presentations. I
have no commercial interest in IoT but am interested in tinkering with IoT
just as a hobby.

I won a Intel Edison / Seeedstudio IoT kit with an edison already configured
with a key pair for aws usage.
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0168KU5FK](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0168KU5FK) So
I guess I will get some experience with this.

They announced both device SDKs and the inclusion of IoT into their standard
SDK. I haven't downloaded the latest python sdk (boto3) yet to check if the
IoT functions have been added yet.

Their documentation seems to make this more complicated that it should be but
I also was handed a Amazon IoT button
[https://aws.amazon.com/iot/button/](https://aws.amazon.com/iot/button/) and
was able to connect it to my aws account and my home wifi in 2 minutes. I have
it sending sns messages to me when I click it. So now I have a reference
project that can be inspected for quicker learning.

If you can, get yourself a IoT button from amazon to play with if you are
interested in their IoT offerings.

Once boto3 has the IoT sdk I will write a mac os x client for acting both like
a device and subscribing to devices.

------
fasouto
I would love to see Amazon working into the documentation and usability of
their existing products instead of create new ones.

~~~
togusa
Three hours pissing around trying to delete something from s3 with powershell
from windows task scheduler today agrees with you :(

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amelius
> With AWS IoT, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all
> your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

This sounds like magic :)

~~~
PCaponetti
also, MQTT has a "retain" flag that lets a publish linger on a topic to be
read later, even when the publisher has gone offline. Seems like "shadows" is
a fancy name for what MQTT already gives you.

~~~
nivertech
AWS IoT doesn't support retained messages.

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johnloeber
It seems there has been a great number of Amazon/AWS updates and new product
offerings recently. Does anyone know why this is the case? (I.e. why all these
releases have occurred over the space of the last two weeks?)

~~~
sync
AWS re:invent is yesterday + today:
[https://reinvent.awsevents.com/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/)

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gkfasdfasdf
This seems like a great way to hook up a home raspberry pi or other device to
the cloud without poking any holes in the firewall. The free tier (250,000
msgs/month) seems like more than enough for a single 'smart home'.

------
acgourley
Serious question - does anyone know who is going to use this?

~~~
gamegoblin
Presumably smart-device companies. I think the main offering here is the
secure communications API. Companies who know how to build interesting
hardware often aren't security experts.

Wifi connected televisions, for example, are often very poorly secured. Of
course, it's not the end of the world if someone powers off your TV remotely
or changes the channel.

But with internet connected devices becoming commonplace (the example they use
on the page is a thermostat), security becomes more and more important. I
would rather not have a hacker set my thermostat to 30C (85F) while I'm on a
winter vacation. Or turn my stove on. Etc.

~~~
brianpan
> Or turn my stove on.

Can we step out of the technology bubble for a minute and agree that not
_everything_ needs to be connected and controllable?

~~~
gamegoblin
I think there's a bright future for smart cooking appliances. Cinder
([https://cindercooks.com/](https://cindercooks.com/)) has made its way around
HN a few times, and I'm pretty excited about it.

It's not even that it needs to be controllable from my smartphone, but I think
it'd be cool to put some cookie dough into the oven, tell the oven "cook these
so that they are just slightly crisp on the outside but gooey on the inside",
and the oven would have sensors and the temperature control mechanisms to do
this, then notify me when it's time to take my cookies out.

It makes sense for such a device to be able to download updates (new
functionality, recipes, retuning algorithms, etc) from the internet.

~~~
brianpan
If microwave "innovation" is any indication, this will result in ovens crammed
with non-feature features and horrible UI/UX.

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manigandham
This seems in direct response to the Microsoft Azure IOT stuff [1]. Not sure
which is better as they both have the same pipelines at this point, although
AWS has more data processing services available. Azure also seems more
complicated to get setup or their website/documentation is a lot worse.

1\. [http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/internet-of-
thin...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/internet-of-
things/default.aspx)

------
boniface316
AWS and Azure.....I would go with Azure!

~~~
philbo87
Does anyone have any knowledge of how this compares to Azure's offering? I
have used Azure Event Hubs for a pretty simple task, and liked it. Curious if
AWS IoT has anything Azure doesn't.

~~~
shawnb576
Event Hubs == AWS Kinesis

Neither of those have any built in rule functionality. You have to set up
machines to pull messages and process them.

This offering is quite different in that it builds in declarative rule support
for filtering/forwarding the data to other AWS offerings like DynamoDB, S3,
Lambda, etc.

That said, you're still going to be writing a lot of code to turn it into a
useful application or monitoring system.

