Application layer
AWS IoT provides several ways to ease the way cloud native applications consume data generated by IoT devices. These connected capabilities include features from serverless computing, fit for purpose database technologies such as time series databases to create materialized views of your IoT data, and management applications to operate, inspect, secure, and manage your IoT operations.
Management applications
The purpose of management applications is to create scalable ways to operate your devices once they are deployed in the field. Common operational tasks such as inspecting the connectivity state of a device, ensuring device credentials are configured correctly, and querying devices based on their current state must be in place before launch so that your system has the required visibility to troubleshoot applications.
AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that audits your device fleets, detects abnormal device behavior, alerts you to security issues, and helps you investigate and mitigate commonly encountered IoT security issues.
AWS IoT Device Management eases the organizing, monitoring, and managing of IoT devices at scale. At scale, customers are managing fleets of devices across multiple physical locations. AWS IoT Device Management enables you to group devices for easier management. You can also enable real-time search indexing against the current state of your devices through Device Management Fleet Indexing. Both Device Groups and Fleet Indexing can be used with Over the Air Updates (OTA) when determining which target devices must be updated to target specific sub-fleets of devices when you want to deploy remote operations (for example, remote reboots, over-the-air (OTA) updates, configuration pushes, and resets.) using jobs. You can also gain privileged and synchronous access (for example, SSH) to your devices for debugging and troubleshooting with Secure Tunneling.
Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management is a fully managed web application that lets domain specialists, such as support technicians and operators, monitor device fleets' health in near real-time, set alerts to notify them of unusual behavior, and take built-in corrective actions (for example, deploy a patch or reboot a device) – all with no code. You can access near real-time state data from devices connected to AWS IoT Core, such as connection status, firmware version, or battery level.
User applications
In addition to managed applications, other internal and external systems need different segments of your IoT data for building different applications. To support end-user views, business operational dashboards, and the other net-new applications you build over time, you will need several other technologies that can receive the required information from your connectivity and ingestion layer and format them to be used by other systems.
Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile apps quickly and easily. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect.
Database services
While a data lake can function as a landing zone for all of your unformatted IoT generated data, to support all the formatted views on top of your IoT data, you need to complement your data lake with structured and semi structured data stores. For these purposes, you should use both NoSQL and SQL databases. These types of databases enable you to create different views of your IoT data for distinct end users of your application.
Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for IoT data. With IoT applications, customers often require flexible data models with reliable performance and automatic scaling of throughput capacity.
With Amazon Aurora your IoT architecture can store structured data in a performant and cost-effective open-source database. When your data needs to be accessible to other IoT applications for predefined SQL queries, relational databases provide you another mechanism for decoupling the device stream of the ingestion layer from your eventual business applications, which need to act on discrete segments of your data.
Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database service for IoT and operational applications that makes it easy to store and analyze trillions of events per day. The purpose-built query engine in Timestream lets you access and analyze recent and historical data together, without needing to specify explicitly in the query whether the data resides in the in-memory or cost-optimized tier. Amazon Timestream has built-in time series analytics functions, helping you identify trends and patterns in your data in near real-time.
Compute services
Frequently, IoT workloads require application code to be run when the data is generated, ingested, consumed, or realized. Regardless of when compute code needs to be run, serverless compute is a highly cost-effective choice. Serverless compute can be leveraged from the edge to the core and from core to applications and analytics.
AWS Lambda allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Due to the scale of ingestion for IoT workloads, AWS Lambda is an ideal fit for running stateless, event-driven IoT applications in a managed environment.
