AWS IoT — Basics

Introduction

Internet of things (IoT) is pretty ambiguous. Any phrase with the word “things” in it is inevitably somewhat ambiguous, right? IoT is a popular and rich topic and depending on the view there is a lot which falls under this term. However, in this post, we will keep it to its core, just a simple use case where we have one or more devices and we want to manage, communicate and use them for our purposes.

I’ve previously written few posts on this topic. You can refer to this post, where I discussed the device landscape for IoT.

From implementation point of view, we have few options, build our own infrastructure, without or without libraries, use cloud providers and/or mix of different technologies. In this post, we will be using AWS IoT service.

AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices — cars, light bulbs, sensor grids, and more — easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.

In this getting started course, we will not be touching the actual physical device but instead see the mechanism using a NodeJs process. Later in posts, we will see how to read values from actual sensors but the principles will be the same. This will keep the complexity in check in scope of this basic setup.