Public Cloud Encyclopedia: IoT Products

Real-time operating system for microcontrollers

FreeRTOS is an open source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS includes a kernel and a growing set of software libraries suitable for use across industry sectors and applications. This includes securely connecting your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS IoT Greengrass. FreeRTOS is built with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use.

A microcontroller contains a simple, resource-constrained processor that can be found in many devices, including appliances, sensors, fitness trackers, industrial automation, and automobiles. Many of these small devices can benefit from connecting to the cloud or locally to other devices, but have limited compute power and memory capacity and typically perform simple, functional tasks. Microcontrollers frequently run operating systems that may not have built-in functionality to connect to local networks or the cloud, making IoT applications a challenge. FreeRTOS helps solve this problem by providing the kernel to run low-power devices as well as software libraries that make it easy to securely connect to the cloud or other edge devices, so you can collect data from them for IoT applications and take action.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/freertos

Bring local compute, messaging, data management, sync, and ML inference capabilities to edge devices.

AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage. With AWS IoT Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, Docker containers, or both, execute predictions based on machine learning models, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet.

With AWS IoT Greengrass, you can use familiar languages and programming models to create and test your device software in the cloud, and then deploy it to your devices. AWS IoT Greengrass can be programmed to filter device data, manage the life cyle of that data on the device, and only transmit necessary information back to AWS. You can also connect to third-party applications, on-premises software, and AWS services out-of-the-box with AWS IoT Greengrass Connectors. Connectors also jumpstart device onboarding with pre-built protocol adapter integrations and allow you to streamline authentication via integration with AWS Secrets Manager.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/greengrass

Enable new, intelligent capabilities with real-time operating systems for deeply embedded IoT applications and edge devices

Azure RTOS is a small, fast, reliable, and easy-to-use real-time operating system (RTOS) for connecting deeply embedded sensors, devices, and gateways from the edge to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/rtos

Cloud intelligence deployed locally on IoT edge devices.

Azure IoT Edge is a fully managed service built on Azure IoT Hub. Deploy your cloud workloads—artificial intelligence, Azure and third-party services, or your own business logic—to run on Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices via standard containers. By moving certain workloads to the edge of the network, your devices spend less time communicating with the cloud, react more quickly to local changes, and operate reliably even in extended offline periods.

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/iot-edge

Google’s purpose-built ASIC designed to run inference at the edge.

AI is pervasive today, from consumer to enterprise applications. With the explosive growth of connected devices, combined with a demand for privacy/confidentiality, low latency and bandwidth constraints, AI models trained in the cloud increasingly need to be run at the edge. Edge TPU is Google’s purpose-built ASIC designed to run AI at the edge. It delivers high performance in a small physical and power footprint, enabling the deployment of high-accuracy AI at the edge.

Links:

• cloud.google.com/edge-tpu

Easily and securely connect devices to the cloud. Reliably scale to billions of devices and trillions of messages.

AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT Core can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT Core, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

AWS IoT Core also makes it easy to use AWS and Amazon services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon QuickSight, and Alexa Voice Service to build IoT applications that gather, process, analyze and act on data generated by connected devices, without having to manage any infrastructure.

Links:

• AWS IoT Core

Register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage connected devices at scale.

As many IoT deployments consist of hundreds of thousands to millions of devices, it is essential to track, monitor, and manage connected device fleets. You need to ensure your IoT devices work properly and securely after they have been deployed. You also need to secure access to your devices, monitor health, detect and remotely troubleshoot problems, and manage software and firmware updates.

AWS IoT Device Management makes it easy to securely register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale. With AWS IoT Device Management, you can register your connected devices individually or in bulk, and easily manage permissions so that devices remain secure. You can also organize your devices, monitor and troubleshoot device functionality, query the state of any IoT device in your fleet, and send firmware updates over-the-air (OTA). AWS IoT Device Management is agnostic to device type and OS, so you can manage devices from constrained microcontrollers to connected cars all with the same service. AWS IoT Device Management allows you to scale your fleets and reduce the cost and effort of managing large and diverse IoT device deployments.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/iot-device-management

Managed service to enable bi-directional communication between IoT devices and Azure.

Enable highly secure and reliable communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. Azure IoT Hub provides a cloud-hosted solution backend to connect virtually any device. Extend your solution from the cloud to the edge with per-device authentication, built-in device management, and scaled provisioning.

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/iot-hub

PBuild industry-leading solutions with a hosted IoT application platform.

Azure IoT Central is highly secure, scales with your business as it grows, ensures your investments are repeatable, and integrates with your existing business apps.

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/iot-central

A fully managed service to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from globally dispersed devices.

Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows you to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of globally dispersed devices. Cloud IoT Core, in combination with other services on Cloud IoT platform, provides a complete solution for collecting, processing, analyzing, and visualizing IoT data in real time to support improved operational efficiency.

Links:

• cloud.google.com/iot-core

Security management for IoT devices.

AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that helps you secure your fleet of IoT devices. AWS IoT Device Defender continuously audits your IoT configurations to make sure that they aren’t deviating from security best practices. A configuration is a set of technical controls you set to help keep information secure when devices are communicating with each other and the cloud. AWS IoT Device Defender makes it easy to maintain and enforce IoT configurations, such as ensuring device identity, authenticating and authorizing devices, and encrypting device data. AWS IoT Device Defender continuously audits the IoT configurations on your devices against a set of predefined security best practices. AWS IoT Device Defender sends an alert if there are any gaps in your IoT configuration that might create a security risk, such as identity certificates being shared across multiple devices or a device with a revoked identity certificate trying to connect to AWS IoT Core.

AWS IoT Device Defender also lets you continuously monitor security metrics from devices and AWS IoT Core for deviations from what you have defined as appropriate behavior for each device. If something doesn’t look right, AWS IoT Device Defender sends out an alert so you can take action to remediate the issue. For example, traffic spikes in outbound traffic might indicate that a device is participating in a DDoS attack. AWS IoT Greengrass and FreeRTOS automatically integrate with AWS IoT Device Defender to provide security metrics from the devices for evaluation. AWS IoT Device Defender can send alerts to the AWS IoT Console, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon SNS. If you determine that you need to take an action based on an alert, you can use AWS IoT Device Management to take mitigating actions such as pushing security fixes.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/iot-device-defender

Comprehensive IoT security solution—including hardware, OS, and cloud components—to actively protect your devices, your business, and your customers.

With billions of new devices connected each year, it’s more important than ever to secure yours. Help protect your data, privacy, physical safety, and infrastructure with Azure Sphere. It’s built on decades of Microsoft experience in hardware, software, and cloud to provide a turnkey security solution for IoT devices.

Links:

A service for building advanced IoT spatial intelligence solutions.

Azure Digital Twins is an IoT service that helps you create comprehensive models of physical environments. Create spatial intelligence graphs to model the relationships and interactions between people, places, and devices. Query data from a physical space rather than disparate sensors. And, build reusable, highly scalable, spatially aware experiences that link streaming data across the physical and digital world.

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/digital-twins

Geospatial APIs to add maps, spatial analytics, and mobility solutions to your apps.

Create location-aware web and mobile applications using simple and secure geospatial services, APIs, and SDKs in Azure. Deliver seamless experiences based on geospatial data with built-in location intelligence from world-class mobility technology partners.

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps

Analytics for IoT devices.

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to run and operationalize sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of IoT data without having to worry about the cost and complexity typically required to build an IoT analytics platform. It is the easiest way to run analytics on IoT data and get insights to make better and more accurate decisions for IoT applications and machine learning use cases.

IoT data is highly unstructured which makes it difficult to analyze with traditional analytics and business intelligence tools that are designed to process structured data. IoT data comes from devices that often record fairly noisy processes (such as temperature, motion, or sound). The data from these devices can frequently have significant gaps, corrupted messages, and false readings that must be cleaned up before analysis can occur. Also, IoT data is often only meaningful in the context of additional, third party data inputs. For example, to help farmers determine when to water their crops, vineyard irrigation systems often enrich moisture sensor data with rainfall data from the vineyard, allowing for more efficient water usage while maximizing harvest yield.

AWS IoT Analytics automates each of the difficult steps that are required to analyze data from IoT devices. AWS IoT Analytics filters, transforms, and enriches IoT data before storing it in a time-series data store for analysis. You can setup the service to collect only the data you need from your devices, apply mathematical transforms to process the data, and enrich the data with device-specific metadata such as device type and location before storing the processed data. Then, you can analyze your data by running ad hoc or scheduled queries using the built-in SQL query engine, or perform more complex analytics and machine learning inference. AWS IoT Analytics makes it easy to get started with machine learning by including pre-built models for common IoT use cases.

You can also use your own custom analysis, packaged in a container, to execute on AWS IoT Analytics. AWS IoT Analytics automates the execution of your custom analyses created in Jupyter Notebook or your own tools (such as Matlab, Octave, etc.) to be executed on your schedule.

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that operationalizes analyses and scales automatically to support up to petabytes of IoT data. With AWS IoT Analytics, you can analyze data from millions of devices and build fast, responsive IoT applications without managing hardware or infrastructure.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/iot-analytics

Easily collect, organize and analyze data from industrial equipment at scale.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. You can easily monitor equipment across your industrial facilities to identify waste, such as breakdown of equipment and processes, production inefficiencies, and defects in products. Today, getting performance metrics from industrial equipment is challenging because data is often locked into proprietary on-premises data stores and typically requires specialized expertise to retrieve and place in a format that is useful for analysis. AWS IoT SiteWise simplifies this process by providing software running on a gateway that resides in your facilities and automates the process of collecting and organizing industrial equipment data. This gateway securely connects to your on-premises data servers, collects data, and sends the data to the AWS Cloud. AWS IoT SiteWise also provides interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial applications through MQTT messages or APIs.

You can use AWS IoT SiteWise to model your physical assets, processes and facilities, quickly compute common industrial performance metrics, and create fully managed web applications to help analyze industrial equipment data, prevent costly equipment issues, and reduce production inefficiencies. With AWS IoT SiteWise, you can focus on understanding and optimizing your operations, rather than building costly in-house data collection and management applications.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/iot-sitewise

Easily detect and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications.

AWS IoT Events is a fully managed service that makes it easy to detect and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications. Events are patterns of data identifying more complicated circumstances than expected, such as changes in equipment when a belt is stuck or motion detectors using movement signals to activate lights and security cameras. Before IoT Events, you had to build costly, custom applications to collect data, apply decision logic to detect an event, and then trigger another application to react to the event. Using IoT Events, it’s simple to detect events across thousands of IoT sensors sending different telemetry data, such as temperature from a freezer, humidity from respiratory equipment, and belt speed on a motor. You simply select the relevant data sources to ingest, define the logic for each event using simple ‘if-then-else’ statements, and select the alert or custom action to trigger when an event occurs. IoT Events continuously monitors data from multiple IoT sensors and applications, and it integrates with other services, such as AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Analytics, to enable early detection and unique insights into events. IoT Events automatically triggers alerts and actions in response to events based on the logic you define to resolve issues quickly, reduce maintenance costs, and increase operational efficiency.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/iot-events

Visually develop IoT applications.

AWS IoT Things Graph is a service that makes it easy to visually connect different devices and web services to build IoT applications.

IoT applications are being built today using a variety of devices and web services to automate tasks for a wide range of use cases, such as smart homes, industrial automation, and energy management. Because there aren't any widely adopted standards, it's difficult today for developers to get devices from multiple manufacturers to connect to each other as well as with web services. This forces developers to write lots of code to wire together all of the devices and web services they need for their IoT application. AWS IoT Things Graph provides a visual drag-and-drop interface for connecting and coordinating interactions between devices and web services, so you can build IoT applications quickly. For example, in a commercial agriculture application, you can define interactions between humidity, temperature, and sprinkler sensors with weather data services in the cloud to automate watering. You represent devices and services using pre-built reusable components, called models, that hide low-level details, such as protocols and interfaces, and are easy to integrate to create sophisticated workflows.

You can get started with AWS IoT Things Graph using these pre-built models for popular device types, such as cameras, motion sensors, and switches, as well as web services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon Rekognition, or create your own custom models. You can deploy and run your IoT applications to the AWS Cloud or AWS IoT Greengrass-enabled devices such as edge gateways and cable set-top boxes, in just a few clicks. AWS IoT Greengrass is software that provides local compute and secure cloud connectivity so devices can respond quickly to local events even without internet connectivity, and runs on a huge range of devices from a Raspberry Pi to a server-level appliance.

Links:

• aws.amazon.com/iot-things-graph

IoT analytics solution giving you real-time insights to drive operational intelligence and transformation.

Improve operations and decision-making based on decades of IoT data delivered through rich visualization and a turnkey experience. Use real-time data insights and interactive analytics to accelerate data use throughout your organization.

Links:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/time-series-insights/#product-overview