Edge layer
The edge layer of your IoT workload consists of the physical hardware of your devices, the embedded operating system that manages the processes on your device, and the device firmware, which is the software and instructions programmed onto your IoT devices. The edge is responsible for sensing and acting on other peripheral devices. Common use cases are reading sensors connected to an edge device, or changing the state of a peripheral based on a user action, such as turning on a light when a motion sensor is activated.
While the AWS IoT Lens is applicable to all IoT systems, industrial IoT deployments often have additional safety, resiliency, and compliance requirements.
Industrial IoT deployments consist of a combination of plant-local Operational Technology (OT), plant-local Information Technology (IT) resources, and remote IT resources, which might be in the public cloud or an enterprise datacenter. The benefit of splitting workloads between local and remote processing is to balance the timeliness and high bandwidth of local resources with the scale and elasticity of remote resources.
The edge deployments are heavily influenced by what AWS calls the three laws of distributed computing: the law of physics, which constrain the latency, throughput, and availability of network connectivity; the law of economics, which determine the cost-effectiveness of transferring ever-increasing volumes of data; and the law of the land, which regulates how data is handled and where it can be stored.
AWS offers the following software and services for the edge layer:
AWS IoT device SDKs include open-source libraries, developer guides with samples, and porting guides so that you can build innovative IoT products or solutions with AWS IoT on your choice of hardware platforms.
FreeRTOS is a real time operating system for microcontrollers that lets you program small, low-power, edge devices while leveraging memory-efficient, secure, embedded libraries.
AWS IoT Greengrass is an IoT edge runtime and cloud service that helps you build, deploy, and manage intelligent IoT device software. It provides you with pre-built components for common capabilities, such as local and cloud MQTT messaging, support for local edge processing including machine learning (ML) inference, logging, monitoring, integration with other AWS services, and local data aggregation, filtering, and transmission to cloud targets. After development is complete, you can seamlessly deploy and remotely manage device software on millions of devices.
AWS IoT SiteWise Edge runs on premises at industrial sites and makes it easy to collect, process, and monitor equipment data locally before sending the data to AWS Cloud destinations. AWS IoT SiteWise Edge can be installed on local hardware, such as third-party industrial gateways and computers, or on AWS Outposts and AWS Snow Family compute devices. It uses AWS IoT Greengrass, an edge runtime that helps build, deploy, and manage applications.
AWS IoT FleetWise Edge is the edge software component for AWS IoT FleetWise. AWS IoT FleetWise Edge allows connected vehicles to collect data and upload it to the AWS IoT FleetWise service. AWS IoT FleetWise helps to transform low-level messages into human-readable values and standardize the data format in the cloud for data analyses. You can also define data collection schemes to control what data to collect in vehicles and when to transfer it to the cloud.
AWS IoT RoboRunner fleet management system gateway (FMSG) is the edge software component that manages all connections between AWS IoT RoboRunner and robot vendor systems. It provides applications for polling robot properties and updating them in AWS IoT RoboRunner, and for enabling multi-robot fleets to interoperate through shared spaces, such as intersections and narrow corridors. Additionally, FMSG includes connectors to vendor fleet management systems.
AWS IoT ExpressLink is connectivity software that powers a range of hardware modules developed and offered by AWS partners, such as Espressif, Infineon, and u-blox. Integrating these wireless modules into the hardware design of your device makes it faster and easier to build IoT products that connect securely with AWS services. These modules provide cloud-connectivity and implement AWS recommended security requirements.
