A presentation given to the Bristol and Bath Internet of Things Meetup at the Engine Shed, Bristol, 11 April 2016

1. AWS IoT
a cloud platform for building IoT
applications
@andypowe11

2. Introduction
Demo
Discussion

3. Introduction

4. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of
physical objects - devices, vehicles, buildings and
other items embedded with electronics,
software, sensors, and network connectivity -
that enables these objects to collect and
exchange data

5. An IoT Platform enables you to connect devices
to services and each other, to exchange and
process data securely, and to enable
applications to interact with devices (even when
they are offline)

8. AWS IoT platform
• Message Broker - MQTT and HTTP topic-based
pub/sub model
• Messages passed using JSON format
• Topics are restricted to an AWS account
• Rules Engine - SQL-based language to select data
from message payloads and push it into S3,
DynamoDB or Lambda…
• Or re-publish (part of) the message on a new topic

9. AWS IoT platform
• Thing Registry - Organises the resources associated
with each thing, including certificates
• Thing Shadow - JSON document used to store and
retrieve current state information for a thing
(device, app, and so on)
• Other IoT platforms are available (e.g. from
Microsoft) – but use of MQTT seems to be de facto

10. Demo

11. IoT Platform Shadow
device
Controller
MQTT
MQTT
End
User
(email
or SMS)
Hello worldTake 50mg aspirin

12. Summary

13. Final thoughts
• The protocols work and integrate well with the rich
service environment offered by AWS
• Coding devices is reasonably straight-forward
• Device SDK and language support somewhat
limited but evolving
• Raspberry Pi and Arduino obvious candidate
devices for PoCs - various starter kits available
• Real world deployments need to consider power,
connectivity, security and managing registry at
scale (automation)