Recently, AWS announced a new version of its IoT Greengrass edge runtime and cloud service during the annual re:Invent. The latest version 2.0 comes with pre-built software components, local software development tools, and new features for managing software on large fleet devices.
The new version of IoT Greengrass comes three years after its version 1.0 release in 2017. AWS designed the service to help customers quickly and easily build intelligent device software as it enables local processing, messaging, data management, ML inference, and pre-built components to accelerate application development. Furthermore, it provides a secure way to seamlessly connect edge devices to any AWS service, as well as to third-party services.
With version 2.0, the public cloud provider provides an open-source edge runtime, a rich set of pre-built software components, tools for local software development, and new features for managing software on large fleets of devices. The characteristics, according to a blog post on the latest version of AWS IoT Greengrass, are as follows:
- The edge runtime is now open source under an Apache 2.0 license and available on Github. With access to the source code, developers can easily integrate their applications, troubleshoot problems, and build more reliable and performant applications that use AWS IoT Greengrass.
- Add or remove pre-built software components based on the IoT use case and their device’s CPU and memory resources. For instance, developers can choose to include pre-built AWS IoT Greengrass components such as stream manager only when processing data streams with their application.
- It includes a new command-line interface (CLI) that allows developers to develop and debug applications on their devices locally – and there is also a new local debug console that helps them visually debug applications on their device.
- It integrates with AWS IoT thing groups, enabling developers to easily organize their devices in groups and manage application deployments across their devices with features to control rollout rates, timeouts, and rollbacks.
Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/greengrass/v2/developerguide/what-is-iot-greengrass.html
With the releases of AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0, industry-leading partners NVIDIA and NXP have qualified many of their devices for AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0, such as NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit, NVIDIA Jetson Nano Module, and NXP S32G-VNP-EVB. And all other partner device listings are available in the AWS Partner Device Catalog.
Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
The edge is a challenging environment for software applications, giving platform capacity, power, connectivity, and physical conditions. Providing a more modular approach to the edge platform as AWS is doing with Greengrass 2.0 is a crucial step to allow device makers and enterprises to have the right side platforms for their demand on the edge to power next-generation applications in the IoT field. Equally key is moving to open-source platforms, allowing greater compatibility and uptake across vendors than proprietary platforms.
Currently, AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 is available in various AWS Regions, and pricing details are available on the pricing page. The company offers customers access to Greengrass 2.0 at no cost for their first 1,000 devices through the end of 2021. Furthermore, developers can find more information through the developer guide.
Lastly, customers can migrate their existing AWS IoT Greengrass 1.x devices and workloads to AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 leveraging the migration guide.
