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AWS Debuts IoT Services for Industrial Users, Developers
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week unveiled multiple Internet of Things (IoT) services aimed at developers, as well as industrial customers managing large fleets of connected devices.
The new AWS IoT SiteWise and AWS IoT Events services are
geared toward industrial users that need help gathering and using the vast amounts of data they collect daily from their equipment. Both of these managed services, announced this week at the 2018 AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, are currently in preview.
IoT SiteWise "collects data from the plant floor, structures and labels the data, and generates real time key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics," according to an AWS announcement. IoT SiteWise lets users manage data gathered from multiple sites in a central environment. Customers can then use that data to, for example, perform large-scale analyses on the health of their equipment or monitor production and performance trends at specific facilities.
IoT Events, meanwhile, is an event-driven monitoring service that lets customers automate their responses to specific IoT device readings.
"Events are patterns of data that identify changes in equipment like a conveyor belt becoming stuck or a motion sensor detecting movement after hours," AWS said. "Using IoT Events, customers can easily detect events like this at massive scale by analyzing data across thousands of IoT sensors and hundreds of equipment management applications in real time."
Two other IoT services announced at re:Invent this week, AWS IoT Things Graph and AWS IoT Greengrass Connectors, are aimed helping developers easily build and enhance their IoT applications.
IoT Things Graph, available in preview, gives developers an easy-to-use visual environment to build apps. Rather than requiring developers to write code in order to integrate services with IoT devices, IoT Things Graph gives them a drag-and-drop interface. Developers can use visual representations, or models, to link services to devices.
The new IoT Greengrass Connectors capability is generally available, and expands on the existing AWS Greengrass solution by adding support for third-party services "such as ServiceNow, Splunk, and Twilio," AWS said. Essentially, IoT developers whose applications are running in Greengrass-enabled devices can now enable those devices to access services from other partners.
"Customers tell us they want to spend less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of getting different devices and services to work together and more time innovating on full-featured IoT applications," said Dirk Didascalou, head of AWS IoT, in a prepared statement announcing the launches. "We are giving customers tools that remove the cost and complexity of building applications at the edge with rich data sources to drive better business decision-making."