Create and simulate hundreds of virtual connected devices without having to configure and manage physical devices

Publication date: May 2018 (last update: November 2021)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides many services to help customers build serverless IoT applications that gather, process, analyze, and act on connected device data, without having to manage any infrastructure. With AWS, customers can also build a secure, agile, and scalable backend for their IoT applications. This eliminates the need for customers to develop and manage their own backend resources and can help reduce costs and increase productivity and innovation. However, it is costly and can be a challenge to test IoT applications and backend services without a large pool of physical, connected devices.

IoT Device Simulator is designed to help customers more easily test device integration and IoT backend services, without the need for physical devices. This solution provides a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that allows customers to create and simulate hundreds of connected devices, without having to configure and manage physical devices, or develop time-consuming scripts. This solution is designed to work out-of-the-box, or you can use this solution as a reference implementation to build a custom simulation engine for your specific use case.

IoT Device Simulator provides a web interface that lets users launch fleets of virtually connected devices from a user-defined template and then simulate them to publish data at regular intervals to AWS IoT. You can also monitor devices from the simulator or observe how backend services are processing the data.

This implementation guide discusses architectural considerations and configuration steps for deploying the IoT Device Simulator in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It includes a link to an AWS CloudFormation template that launches, configures, and runs the AWS services required to deploy this solution using AWS best practices for security and availability.

The guide is intended for IT infrastructure architects, administrators, and DevOps professionals who have practical experience with IoT devices, and the AWS Cloud.

Note

This solution is designed to simulate device data for testing. It is not recommended for use in production environments.