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AWS Makes It Easier To Onboard IoT Devices En Masse
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new capability in its IoT Core service that lets users automate the process of onboarding large numbers of devices.
The new fleet provisioning feature, announced in late April, takes a template approach to onboarding, particularly when it comes to assigning unique identities to each device. It works within IoT Core, a managed service that facilitates communications between Internet of Things (IoT) devices and AWS endpoints, including applications like S3, Kinesis, SageMaker and Lambda.
While IoT Core already lets users automate device registrations and permissions assignments via its Just-In-Time-Registration and Just-In-Time-Provisioning features, creating and delivering unique identities for each device is still a time-consuming process, especially for those (such as original equipment manufacturers) that frequently need to activate hundreds of devices at a time.
The fleet provisioning feature is meant to streamline this process, potentially reducing manufacturing costs and development times.
"Fleet Provisioning securely delivers a unique digital identity to each device, validates the device payload via a Lambda function, registers the identity in a customers' AWS account, and sets up the devices with all required permissions and registry metadata (e.g. Things, Thing Groups)," AWS said in a blog post.
"All of this happens automatically upon the devices' first connection to AWS IoT Core, or whenever a device needs to receive new credentials or updated configuration, saving valuable time and engineering resources for customers."
According to the post, fleet provisioning supports two types of provisioning methods:
- Provisioning by Claim, often referred to as a bootstrap certificate approach.
- Provisioning by a trusted user (e.g. a Mobile/Web App user): this process is very similar to the provisioning by claim process.
The post, attributed to Raleigh Murch, AWS senior IoT architect for emerging services, and Alok Jha, AWS senior technical product manager, goes into great detail about the steps to perform each method using fleet provisioning.
The fleet provisioning feature comes at no extra cost for IoT Core users. More information on the feature is available here.