News

2 New AWS IoT Services Go Live

• By Becky Nagel
• June 3, 2019

Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week announced the "live" release of two new Internet of Things (IoT) services that it had previewed at its re:Invent conference back in November 2018.

AWS IoT Events is designed to allow developers to easily create programs that can "detect the state of anything and take action," as the company puts it.

Developers can create "detector modules" to represent device states and transitions, and then trigger "actions" when "critical events" are detected by the system. Example events given include stuck conveyor belts, temperature changes, misaligned robotic arms and after-hours motions

AWS IoT Events lets developers "build robust, highly automated systems. Actions can, for example, send a text message to a service technician or invoke an AWS Lambda function."

Detailed screenshots of how the system works can be found further down on this page. Pricing details can be found here.

The second product, AWS IoT Things Graph, lets developers "easily" build IoT applications "visually."

Business logic is represented via "flow," and a "model" is used for the Web services and devices. From there, actions, events and states can be added. There are also mappings for bringing the flow and converting the output. This output can then go either to the AWS cloud or AWS IoT Greengrass, which is Amazon's IoT platform for smart edge computing.

The tool is aimed at both consumer and industrial IoT uses. It offers prebuilt models for a "number" of devices (including switches, camera motion sensors and Web services like Amazon Rekognition and Amazon S3), or developers can of course create their own.

Models are reusable and combinable.

Post-launch, IoT Things Graph "coordinates interactions between devices and Web services and retries any failed steps to keep your workflow running smoothly," AWS explained. "While your application is running, you can track metrics, set alarms, view logs files, and watch real-time status updates."

More details and screenshots of exactly how AWS IoT Things Graph works can be found here. Pricing details are here.