AWS IoT, announced as a beta service a couple of months ago, is now Generally Available (GA).
AWS IoT is Amazon’s approach to the growing business of Internet of Things, relying on multiple AWS services to collect, store, and analyze data coming from many devices, and to control them: AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Kinesis, S3, Redshift, Machine Learning and DynamoDB. Amazon said they learned doing IoT by their “experience with Amazon Robotics, drones (Amazon Prime Air), the Amazon Echo, the Dash Button, and multiple generations of Kindles.” InfoQ has covered AWS IoT in much detail when it was launched as beta, so we will add only what is new.
Amazon makes available a number of IoT Starter Kits including development microcontroller boards, sensors, actuators and the AWS IoT Device SDK, the software being open source. The hardware is provided by Avnet, BeagleBone, Dragonboard, Intel (Edison), Marvell, MediaTek, Microchip, Renesas, Seeeduino (an Arduino Yun board), and TI (LaunchPad).
Amazon has enhanced the AWS iOS SDK to create IoT applications, and they are working to add support for Android applications. They have also added IPv6 support for communication between devices and the IoT Device Gateway. For controlling devices, AWS uses HTTPS while for collecting data from them they support both HTTPS and MQTT with X.509 for authentication.
Regarding pricing, AWS offers a free tier of 250K messages/month for the first 12 months. The paid subscription costs $5 ($8 in the Asia Pacific region) for 1M messages sent to the gateway or to devices. A message is a block of 512 bytes. The service is currently available in US East, US West, EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and it can be accessed from anywhere in the world as long as the client does not have a legal restriction.
