Choosing an AWS IoT service
Understand the differences and pick the one that's right for you
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Purpose
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Help determine which AWS IoT services are the best fit for your organization.
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Last updated
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June 28, 2024
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Covered services
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Foundational services
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Use case or industry-specific services
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Device and design
Connect, manage and monitor
Analyze and act
Design and validate
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Smart manufacturing
Connected vehicles
Public infrastructure
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Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become a transformative force in the business world. They offer a
wide range of opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and customer-centric strategies.
IoT provides the foundation for smart devices, smart homes, smart buildings, next-generation vehicles,
smart manufacturing, and public infrastructure.
Businesses can use IoT technologies to increase efficiency with automation, gain visibility into their
supply chains, get insights from their data, and offer smart connected experiences for their customers.
AWS offers a variety of purpose-built IoT services. The foundational services help you to design and simplify
complex IoT tasks.
These services provide device-to-cloud connectivity, secure data ingestion, data processing, analytics, and the
ability to run machine learning (ML) inferences on the edge.
In addition, AWS offers IoT services that are designed for particular industries or use cases, including smart
manufacturing, connected vehicles, and public infrastructure.
This decision guide will help you ask the right questions, evaluate your criteria, and determine which IoT
services are the best fit for your needs.
Understand
IoT is sometimes described as a bridge between the physical and digital worlds.
It is a network of connected devices and sensors that communicate with each other and the
cloud. These devices and sensors (sometimes called things) collect data from a very broad range
of sources.
The devices collect data from sources that are connected to home appliances, buildings,
machines, vehicles, hardware, factory production lines, pipelines, and connected people (for example,
people wearing smart, connected devices for monitoring their health and fitness).
IoT services are designed to help you:
Securely connect your IoT devices to the cloud.
Process the data locally on the devices.
Securely capture and ingest data in the cloud for additional processing or for added intelligence.
Manage structured and unstructured data, such as video streams.
Analyze that data and enrich it further using analytics and machine learning services
to generate actionable insights.
Develop plans that you can act on (such as exercise recommendations for individuals, or predictive
machine maintenance strategies for industrial assets or fleets of vehicles).
Perform remote over-the-air updates to keep your devices and systems up to date.
Scale your operations from an initial set of devices up to billions globally, while achieving
higher reliability, quality of service, and availability.
Monitor your organization’s security posture across your entire device fleet.
When asking how AWS IoT services can be useful to your organization, it's important to think about how these services
are organized.
If you think about these services as a stack, as shown in the previous image, the foundational AWS Cloud
services you need are at the base. These include services that provide compute, storage, database, containers, system
management, networking management, and security. These services can also provide the analytics, ML, and artificial
intelligence (AI) capabilities required to make the most of the insights you get from your IoT data.
Moving up the stack, you see a range of purpose-built IoT services (including industry-specific services) and IoT solutions
from both AWS and AWS Partners.
Generative AI and IoT
While IoT-specific generative AI is still evolving, we see two broad categories of use cases:
Use cases that help IoT solution developers build more capable solutions faster and with higher quality.
Use cases that help end users naturally interact with IoT devices to generate recommendations and insights from their data.
There are a wide range of possibilities when you connect a vast amount of IoT data with generative AI technology. Your initial focus, however,
is likely to be on tangible use cases where you can find value today.
For example, developers can provide a description of the application function with details about an IoT circuit board and sensors.
Then, a generative AI-powered function can produce prototype code with associated infrastructure as code (IaC) and installation steps.
It can also provide generic prototype code for one type of board and automatically convert it to working code for another.
Consider also this sample app
for using AWS IoT TwinMaker with Amazon Bedrock in manufacturing as an example of what you can
accomplish when combining AI and IoT.
Further, generative AI models can create infrastructure code (such as AWS CloudFormation templates) that define asset models in
AWS IoT SiteWise, device metadata in AWS IoT Device Management, and other associated AWS infrastructure.
This can reduce proof of concept (PoC) development time and lower the barrier of entry to create customized AWS solutions.
You can then use generative AI models to audit environments and provide recommendations to save on costs and improve your organization's security posture.
Finally, you can synthetically create realistic and unidentifiable user data to comprehensively test IoT applications with a small sample
of data and description of user behavior. This can help you to test unforeseen edge cases. This testing results in better products, accelerated
release cycles, and fewer production issues.
Consider
Here are some of the key criteria to consider when you’re choosing which IoT services are the best fit for your organization.
- Business outcome
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Business outcome
Start by articulating the problem that you want to solve, along with the desired business outcome that will result
from solving that problem. AWS offers a number of purpose-built services that are specific in what they can provide
to help you get to the business outcome you want.
For example, you might run a logistics company and use robots in your warehouses to automate the movement of packages
within the facility. To reduce downtime, it’s important to be able to quickly get reports of a malfunction and react
right away. It’s even better to reliably get data that signals a potential upcoming malfunction. An AWS monitoring
service such as AWS IoT Events
is designed specifically with that kind of scenario in mind. Similarly,
AWS IoT SiteWise is designed to help
you analyze and get value from the vast amount of data coming in from your connected sites (where you might be receiving
data from industrial sites and equipment).
- Scale, reliability, and quality of service
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Scale, reliability, and quality of service
To properly consider the issues of scale, reliability, and quality of service in AWS IoT, it's important to know that the
AWS global infrastructure is built around AWS Regions and Availability Zones.
AWS Regions provide multiple physically
separated and isolated Availability Zones, which are connected with low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant
networking. With Availability Zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically fail over
between zones without interruption. Availability Zones are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than
traditional single or multiple data center infrastructures.
To ensure availability in the event of a disruption, AWS IoT operates across multiple Availability Zones. In terms of
the scale, reliability, and quality of service attributes of specific AWS services, here are some useful things to know:
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AWS IoT Core provides fully managed
MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport)
-based messaging features. You
can use these features to help you build adaptive IoT architectures. It also provides native support for a managed
MQTT broker that supports persistent, always-on connections and advanced message retention policies. The broker
also handles millions of devices and topics simultaneously. AWS IoT and the AWS IoT Device SDKs support the MQTT
Quality of Service (QoS) levels 0 and 1.
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AWS IoT Greengrass provides support for
data resiliency and backup with features that allow devices to communicate
over the local network, even after losing internet connectivity. This allows the core to receive messages that are sent
while the core is offline. Stream manager processes data locally until the connection is restored, and sends data to the
cloud or local storage.
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With AWS IoT Device Management, you can
update devices in the field while using Amazon Amazon S3 versioning for all firmware and
software, and update manifests for devices.
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With AWS CloudFormation, you can document
your IoT infrastructure as code and provision cloud resources using
a CloudFormation template.
- Lifecycle management
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Lifecycle management
From initial deployment to eventual retirement, your IoT devices have a finite lifespan. You need to manage
them effectively, reliably, and securely during that lifespan to achieve your business goals.
How you address IoT
product lifecycle management (PLM) is important in considering the AWS IoT services that you’ll need. Services such
as AWS IoT Core,
AWS IoT Device Management, and
AWS IoT Device Defender all provide
important pieces of lifecycle management
(as described in this blog post).
- Edge support
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Edge support
In many IoT scenarios, you're working with devices that might rely on an edge computing model
— and you need
services that support running workloads at the edge.
A great example of this is AWS IoT Greengrass.
It’s an open source IoT edge runtime and cloud service that helps
you build, deploy, and manage IoT applications on your devices.
You can use it to build software that enables your devices to act locally on the data that they generate, run
predictions based on ML models, and filter and aggregate device data. It enables your devices to collect and
analyze data closer to where that data is generated, react autonomously to local events, and communicate
securely with other devices on the local network.
Similarly, AWS IoT ExpressLink powers a range of connectivity
modules that are developed and offered by
AWS Partners. These modules include software that implements AWS mandated security requirements. This makes it
faster and easier for you to securely connect devices to the cloud, and to seamlessly integrate with a range of AWS services.
AWS IoT SiteWise Edge brings features of AWS IoT SiteWise in the cloud
to the factory premises. Specifically, you can
use asset models that are defined in the cloud service to process data in the SiteWise Edge gateway locally. You can also
visualize equipment data by using local SiteWise Monitor dashboards that are served from the SiteWise Edge gateway.
AWS IoT Device SDKs are also a great resource
for edge support. They include open source libraries, developer guides with
samples, and porting guides.
Finally, the AWS IoT Lens for
the AWS Well-Architected Framework offers further guidance about
the edge layer in IoT systems and what you need to support it.
- Digital twin capabilities
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Digital twin capabilities
A digital twin is a live digital representation of a system and all of its physical and digital components.
It is dynamically updated with data to mimic the true structure, state, and behavior of the system.
The AWS IoT service that provides digital twin capabilities is
AWS IoT TwinMaker. You can use it to build
operational digital twins of physical and digital systems.
With AWS IoT TwinMaker, you can create digital visualizations to help you keep track of your physical
factory, building, or industrial plant. The visualizations use measurements and analyses from a variety
of real-world sensors, cameras, and enterprise applications. You can use this real-world data to monitor
operations, diagnose and correct errors, and optimize operations.
- Development time
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Development time
To develop an IoT solution, you will likely need to structure your work into multiple phases, from
proof of concept (PoC) to production and scale. You start getting benefits from IoT sooner if you use
the right tools to prepare for your PoC, and prove the value of what you’re developing to get the support
needed for broader implementation. The AWS tools that you can use for this include:
AWS IoT Core Device Advisor —
This tool provides a cloud-based, fully managed test capability for validating
IoT devices during device software development. It includes pre- built tests that you can use to validate IoT devices for
reliable and secure connectivity with AWS IoT Core, before deploying devices to production.
AWS IoT Device SDKs —
The SDKs include open source libraries, developer guides with samples, and porting guides.
You can use these to build IoT products or solutions on your choice of hardware platforms.
AWS IoT Device Client —
This tool provides code to help your device connect to AWS IoT, perform fleet provisioning
tasks, support device security policies, connect using secure tunneling, and process jobs on your device.
AWS IoT Sensors (IOS app) —
You can use this tool to visualize sensor data from your device with 1-click.
- Video streaming support
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Video streaming support
IoT implementations increasingly have video as a key data source. Those sources can include everything
from smartphones, security cameras, and webcams to drones and cameras embedded in cars. In industrial settings,
video inputs have become a critical component for automating defect detection sequences on the production line.
Here are a couple of the AWS IoT services that you might consider to manage and make effective use of video inputs:
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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams —
You can use this fully managed AWS service to stream live video from devices to
the AWS Cloud, or to build applications for real-time video processing or batch-oriented video analytics. You can
also use it to capture massive amounts of live video data from millions of sources. These sources include smartphones,
security cameras, webcams, cameras embedded in cars, and drones.
In addition, you can use Kinesis Video Streams to send non-video, time series data such as audio data, thermal imagery,
depth data, and radar data. Using live video streams from these sources into a Kinesis video stream, you can build applications
to access the data, frame-by-frame, in real time for low-latency processing.
AWS IoT FleetWise
vision system data — Announced in preview at re:Invent 2023, AWS IoT FleetWise supports
vision system data collection for vehicles. With this feature, you can collect metadata, object list and detection data,
and images or videos from camera, lidar, radar, and other vision subsystems.
- Security
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Security
Security is a vital component of any IoT implementation. It's important for any IoT service to ensure that
all elements of an IoT connection are encrypted and incorporate security best practices—whether it’s handling data
at the edge or in transit to the cloud.
All traffic to and from AWS IoT,
for example, is sent securely over Transport Layer Security (TLS). AWS cloud
security mechanisms protect data as it moves between AWS IoT and other AWS services. AWS IoT services address
every layer of your application and device security.
You can safeguard your device data with preventative mechanisms, like encryption and access control, and
consistently audit and monitor your configurations with AWS IoT Device Defender.
You can use
AWS IoT Device Defender to proactively assess the cloud configuration of your IoT device fleet, provide
ongoing monitoring of device activities through rule-based and ML-based capabilities, and trigger alarms
when an audit violation or behavior anomaly is identified.
Choose
Now that you know the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate your IoT service options, you're ready to choose which
services might be a good fit.
Use the following table to help determine the services that are the best fit for your
organization and use case.
- Foundational services
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These services are foundational to the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions on AWS.
- Use case or industry-specific services
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These services are designed to meet the needs of specific industries or use cases.
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What is it optimized for?
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Service
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Smart manufacturing
These services are optimized for combining machine data from a single line, a factory, or a
network of sites (such as manufacturing plants, assembly facilities, and refineries) to proactively
improve performance.
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AWS IoT SiteWise
AWS IoT SiteWise Edge
AWS IoT TwinMaker
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Connected vehicles
This service is optimized for providing applications that analyze vehicle
fleet health, which can help you to more quickly identify potential maintenance
issues or make in-vehicle infotainment systems more capable.
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AWS IoT FleetWise
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Public infrastructure
These services are used in smart cities and transportation systems to:
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Support the use of smart metering technologies
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Improve operations and logistics
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Support the tactical edge
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Manage traffic and public safety
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AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN
AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk
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Use
To get started with the AWS IoT services, we have provided a pathway to explore each service. The following sections
provide links to in-depth documentation, hands-on tutorials, and resources.
The first section provides links to resources for the key foundational IoT services:
FreeRTOS, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT ExpressLink, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Defender, AWS IoT Device Management,
AWS IoT Events, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, and AWS IoT Analytics.
- FreeRTOS
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What is FreeRTOS?
Learn about the microcontroller operating system that makes small, low-powered edge devices
easy to program, deploy, secure, and maintain.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS
Use AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS to qualify data throughput rate with the FreeRTOS
operating system.
Explore the guide
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FreeRTOS Porting Guide
Port FreeRTOS to a microcontroller platform.
Explore the guide
- AWS IoT Greengrass
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What is AWS IoT Greengrass
Set up AWS IoT Greengrass and integrate it with other services.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT Greengrass V2 workshop
Build a virtual environment and an edge gateway that runs AWS IoT Greengrass Core software
V2.
Use the workshop
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AWS IoT Greengrass API Reference
Learn about all the API operations for AWS IoT Greengrass V2 in detail. Read sample requests,
responses, and errors for the supported web services protocols.
Explore the API reference
- AWS IoT ExpressLink
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What is AWS IoT ExpressLink?
Learn how ExpressLink hardware modules are preprogrammed to connect to AWS IoT services
and are preloaded with security credentials.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT ExpressLink Onboarding-by-Claim Customer/OEM Guide
Learn about an onboarding-by-claim mechanism that was specifically created to make the most
of an AWS IoT ExpressLink module's capabilities.
Explore the guide
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Start working with AWS IoT ExpressLink
Explore the AWS IoT ExpressLink development kit and resources to help you start using it.
Explore the guide
- AWS IoT Core
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Get started with AWS IoT Core
Learn about AWS IoT concepts and terms that will help you start using AWS IoT.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT Core API Reference
Explore the API operations for AWS IoT Core, including the data plane, jobs, and secure
tunneling. It also provides sample requests, responses, and errors.
Explore the API reference
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AWS IoT Core tutorials
Discover AWS IoT tutorials and choose the best learning path for your goal.
Get started with the tutorials
- AWS IoT Device Defender
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What is AWS IoT Device Defender?
Learn about AWS IoT Device Defender, a security and monitoring service you can use to audit
the configuration of your devices, monitor connected devices, and mitigate security risks.
Explore the guide
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Use the disconnected duration metric in AWS IoT Device Defender
The disconnected duration metric in AWS IoT Device Defender provides AWS IoT Device Defender
Detect customers the ability to monitor Internet of Things (IoT) device connectivity
status and duration of disconnection. This blog explains how to use it.
Read the blog
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AWS IoT Device Defender pricing guide
Learn how the pricing elements of the service work.
Explore the pricing guide
- AWS IoT Device Management
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Get started with AWS IoT Device Management
Start managing devices (also known as "things") and see an example of how information about
things is stored in your registry as JSON data.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT Device Management FAQs
Learn about where, how, when, and why you might use AWS IoT Device Management.
Explore the FAQs
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Secure Internet of Things (IoT) with AWS
Get a detailed look at how you can use AWS security services to secure your IoT workloads in
consumer and industrial environments.
Explore the whitepaper
- AWS IoT Events
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What is AWS IoT Events?
Use AWS IoT Events to monitor your equipment or device fleets for failures or changes in
operation, and to initiate actions when such events occur.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT Events pricing guide
Learn how AWS IoT Events pricing works.
Explore the pricing guide
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AWS IoT Events FAQs
Learn about where, how, when and why you might use AWS IoT Events.
Explore the FAQs
- Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
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What is Amazon Kinesis Video Streams?
Use Kinesis Video Streams to stream live video from devices to the AWS Cloud, or to
build applications for real-time video processing or batch-oriented video analytics.
Explore the guide
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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams pricing
Learn how Kinesis Video Streams pricing works.
Explore the pricing guide
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Amazon Kinesis Video Streams with WebRTC Developer Guide
Use Kinesis Video Streams with WebRTC to build applications for live peer-to-peer media
streaming, or for real-time audio or video interactivity between camera IoT devices, web
browsers, and mobile devices.
Explore the guide
- AWS IoT Analytics
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What is AWS IoT Analytics?
Use AWS IoT Analytics to automate the steps that are required to analyze data from IoT
devices.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT Analytics pricing guide
Learn how AWS IoT Analytics pricing works.
Explore the pricing guide
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Get started with AWS IoT Analytics (console tutorial)
Create the AWS IoT Analytics resources (also known as components) that you need to discover
useful insights about your IoT device data.
Explore the tutorial
This section links to resources about use case or industry-specific AWS IoT services, including
AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT TwinMaker, and AWS IoT FleetWise.
- AWS IoT SiteWise
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What is AWS IoT SiteWise?
Use AWS IoT SiteWise to collect, model, analyze, and visualize data from industrial equipment
at scale.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT SiteWise pricing guide
Learn how AWS IoT SiteWise pricing works—with separate charges for usage of Messaging,
Data Processing, Data Storage, Data Export, AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor, AWS IoT SiteWise Edge,
and Alarms.
Explore the pricing guide
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AWS IoT SiteWise FAQs
Learn about where, how, when and why you might use AWS IoT SiteWise.
Explore the FAQs
- AWS IoT TwinMaker
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What is AWS IoT TwinMaker?
Use AWS IoT TwinMaker to build operational digital twins of physical and digital systems.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT TwinMaker pricing guide
Learn how AWS IoT TwinMaker pricing works. You can choose between the basic, standard, and
tiered bundle pricing plans, depending upon the size and unique characteristics of your
workloads.
Explore the pricing guide
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AWS IoT TwinMaker FAQs
Learn about where, how, when and why you might use AWS IoT TwinMaker.
Explore the FAQs
- AWS IoT FleetWise
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What is AWS IoT FleetWise?
Use AWS IoT FleetWise to collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near real
time.
Explore the guide
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AWS IoT FleetWise pricing guide
Learn how pricing works for AWS IoT FleetWise. It describes how it works on two dimensions:
by number of vehicles and by number of messages.
Explore the pricing guide
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AWS IoT FleetWise FAQs
Learn about where, how, when and why you might use AWS IoT FleetWise.
Explore the FAQs
Explore
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Architecture diagrams
Explore reference architecture diagrams to help you develop your IoT solutions on AWS.
Explore architecture diagrams
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Whitepapers
Explore whitepapers to help you get started, learn best practices, and understand your IoT
options.
Explore whitepapers
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AWS videos
Explore videos that will help you better use and understand the available AWS IoT services.
Watch the videos
