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AWS Unveils Next-Gen Greengrass Platform, Now Open Source
Version 2.0 of AWS Greengrass, an edge runtime service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lets Internet of Things (IoT) devices tap into the AWS cloud, was released this week.
AWS announced the general availability of Greengrass 2.0 at its ongoing re:Invent virtual conference. Coming over three years after its version 1.0 release in mid-2017, version 2.0 of Greengrass is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and available on GitHub here.
"Access to the source code allows you to more easily integrate your applications, troubleshoot problems, and build more reliable and performant applications that use AWS IoT Greengrass," wrote Channy Yun, AWS principal developer advocate, in a blog post Tuesday announcing the release.
Greengrass 1.x users will need to migrate their devices and workloads to Greengrass 2.0 in order to begin using the new open source release. Existing Greengrass 1.x devices will run uninterrupted unless users decide to migrate.
Besides being open source, version 2.0 of Greengrass features a few other changes and enhancements. It has a new command-line interface, for instance, as well as a new local debug console. These improvements let users develop and debug their code on a test device before running it on production devices, according to Yun.
The new release also includes prebuilt components that users can add to or remove from their applications as needed. "For example," according to Yun, "you can choose to include pre-built AWS IoT Greengrass components such as stream manager only when you need to process data streams with your application, or machine learning components only when you want to perform machine learning inference locally on your devices."
He indicated that Greengrass 1.x users who decide to migrate to version 2.0 can add components to their applications while still keeping their version 1.x code unchanged until they decide to update.
Version 2.0 also integrates with "AWS IoT thing groups." Users can organize their devices into groups and control how applications are deployed across device fleets. They can control "rollout rates, timeouts, and rollbacks," for instance.
AWS is currently offering customers access to Greengrass 2.0 at no cost for their first 1,000 devices through the end of 2021. More information, including pricing, is available here.