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Amazon Rockets into the Cloud with AWS IoT

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It seems like every tech company in the known world wants its own little piece of the cloud, and the data and analytics that come with it. Well, in an announcement that made the whole industry sit up and take notice, Amazon has announced that it will make a grab for huge slice of the pie with its brand new Amazon Web Services IoT platform (AWS IoT).

The company said that AWS IoT is designed to be a managed cloud platform that will facilitate communication between connected devices and cloud applications, and then onward to other devices. With this platform, Amazon said, IoT applications can keep track of and communicate with all devices, all the time, securely managing thousands of connections at the same time. It can even read the state of a device that is disconnected because it stores the last read state, making the device online all the time, and also allows users to set a new device state and make it active when the device reconnects.

It’s set up to make it easy to use other AWS services like Lambda, Kinesis, S3, Machine Learning, and DynamoDB. All of this capability, tied together, enables the construction of IoT apps to gather data, then analyze and automatically act on it. It supports HTTP and MQTT, a communication protocol designed for low-bandwidth intermittent connections. In terms of security, apps developed on AWS IoT have authentication and end-to-end encryption protocols throughout the connected system.

“I believe that the recent Amazon entry into IOT is a massive validation of mass market IoT, and a huge shot in the arm for interoperability for IoT devices,” said Jim Hunter, Chief Scientist and Technology Evangelist, Greenwave Systems, an IoT software and services provider. “Mass market providers such as telecoms, cable, utility and other tier one retailers require much more than generic one size fits all cloud services. AWS IoT services will facilitate functional, reliable and scalable hosting environments and communications for IoT device providers.”

None of this technology is technically new, but that doesn’t matter. The real power here comes from the reach of the Amazon brand. Perhaps that accounts for the number of major implementations that have already been announced. Let’s take a look at a few, shall we?

Image via Shutterstock

Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments has announced the SimpleLink Wi-Fi wireless microcontroller, designed to ease that way for secure connection of IoT edge devices to the AWS cloud. TI tied the open AWS IoT Software Development Kit to SimpleLink so that developers can more quickly link up to AWS IoT services and speed up the development process on the platform. It includes an evaluation kit, temperature sensor and an accelerometer, and through an add-on, almost any additional sensor type that’s needed.

“We are pleased our customers can now leverage AWS IoT to build cloud-connected products for the Internet of Things on a global scale,” said Avner Goren, GM, Strategic Marketing, Embedded Processing, TI. “AWS IoT helps TI expand on its commitment to easily add embedded Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity to a wide-range of home, industrial and consumer electronics.”

Marvell
Marvell has gotten into the Amazon ecosystem with a starter kit, too. The Marvell EZ-Connect MW302 IoT Starter Kit is powered by AWS IoT, and is poised to ease the integration of data management and analytics tools for developers. This kit features a microcontroller SoC and is already available for sale globally.

“Our collaboration with AWS represents Marvell's continued dedication to innovate and develop optimized solutions to accelerate the growth of the IoT industry,” said Philip Poulidis, VP and GM, Wireless and IoT Business Units, Marvell. “Now, through Marvell's EZ-Connect MW302 IoT Starter Kit, our customers gain access to AWS IoT to rapidly develop and bring to market a new wave of innovative, groundbreaking experiences and services for consumers and businesses.”

Royal Philips
Royal Philips has been collaborating with Amazon for a while now, and its new offering is a reinforcement of that partnership. Under AWS IoT, the company will expand the connectivity, capabilities and services of Philips’ HealthSuite digital platform, which is an open IT infrastructure for secure healthcare data management. With AWS IoT, Philips will enhance its platform with an IoT environment for customers with smarter, personalized solutions for healthier living and coordinating care with health professionals and devices.

“The digital health revolution and the power of the IoT offer tremendous opportunities to positively transform how care is delivered,” said Jeroen Tas, CEO, Philips Healthcare Informatics, Solutions and Services. “By unleashing data from connected devices and health records, combined with analytics, valuable insights into how we can live and age well can be uncovered.”

MediaTek
Another starter kit comes out of MediaTek Labs in the form of the LinkIt ONE IoT platform and Grove IoT Starter Kit. Aimed directly at developers, the kit pairs the platform and a range of Grove sensors from Seeed Studio with the cloud services and cloud management portfolio inside AWS IoT. The SDK includes AWS IoT-specific libraries for the LinkIt ONE board using the Arduino IDE.

“MediaTek Labs is committed to bringing IoT to the masses by providing a simplified solution to assist developers as they start on their first IoT projects,” said Marc Naddell, VP, MediaTek Labs. “The new IoT Starter Kit contains everything a developer needs to create powerful proofs-of-concept for IoT and Wearables and bring their ideas to fruition.”

Two Bulls
Two Bulls is a boutique digital product solutions company in New York and its new platform is based in the AWS IoT technology. Now the company will use the new IoT cloud to make its control and configuration products more scalable, reliable, and faster to market for its clients.

“We are thrilled and honored to be working with Amazon Web Services as they deepen their IoT offerings,” said Noah Harlan, co-founder, Two Bulls. “We are among the first companies to provide access to services and frameworks that allow product owners and OEMs to successfully manage and scale IoT solutions. This will help us build products that ultimately simplify and enrich people’s lives.”

Treasure Data
Moving over to the data management realm, Treasure Data, an analytics firm for large-scale event data, has unveiled a new set of enterprise-level integrations with AWS IoT, in addition to Salesforce and Marketo. The company said its customers ask 1.9 million questions about data collected on the platform every month and this new integration will simplify the process of asking related questions and a series of questions. It will allow business analysts and data scientists to ask more powerful questions against event data, using an interface designed to be intuitive and clean, with enhanced performance, user experience and collaboration features.

“Business data is spread across numerous storage silos and business applications and is only valuable if teams have immediate access to the information and answers they need,” said Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO and co-founder, Treasure Data. “Our team is committed to simplifying this process and delivering a high-value analytics toolbox to empower customers to make smart business decisions based on their data.”

SoftNAS
SoftNAS UltraFast uses its pairing with AWS IoT to achieve up to 16 times more efficient bandwidth use between the cloud and traditional data centers, as well as remote offices, manufacturing and warehouses. It is designed to speed offsite backups and retrieval of data, ease replication between data centers over an enterprise WAN, manage master copy data for global content publishing and send disaster recovery functions to the cloud for quick synchronization of data from any source.

No matter what anyone says, this is a huge development in the sky high world of IoT in the cloud, and anyone else working in the space had best take notice, or start playing along, like the early adopters here.

There’s a reason that Amazon warriors have the reputation they do. Don’t be surprised if you find them at your gates. 




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
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Editorial Director

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