Internet of Things (IoT) - From Device To AWS Cloud

A AWS centric IoT architecture - device (blue & green), gateway (orange) , and cloud (red)

Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) will allow humans and machines to make better decision and live better lives. How? With more data and more insight. But how does one go about creating an IoT? An IoT is comprised of three parts : 1. Device 2. Gateway 3. Cloud


Device

A device can sense information on its environment, collect the data, then send it to the gateway. Looking at the picture above, a device is comprised of input sensors (yellow), software (blue), hardware (green), and output (gray). Input sensors convert analog information such as temperature, humidity, switches, velocity into digital values.

Gateway

Most devices at home or the office will connect to the gateway via WiFi. Outside of home or the office, the gateway will mostly be cellular/2G/3G/4G LTE. For areas without WiFi, a personal area network (PAN) such at Bluetooth or Zigbee can be used to pass data from the device to the gateway. NFC is another option, but it is mostly relegated to close distance payment systems.


Cloud

The cloud is the end point of data that was collected by the device and delivered by the gateway. There are many companies vying to be in this market - from bare bone compute provider like Rackspace to traditional enterprise providers like HP & Dell joining the fray. Amazon AWS has a slick end to end solution : starting with AWS IAM to ensure the the right person and device can only access proper data. AWS Kinesis enables devices to stream data to the gateway and eventually into the AWS Kinesis as streams via JSON data objects. AWS Lambda Function is code that wakes up instantly to data in the Kinesis  - so that the data can be processed and shipped to AWS S3 Bucket for storage or AWS Dynamo NoSQL DB for analysis. Amazon AWS provides a complete suite of API to enable this entire flow.

Conclusion

IoT system is comprised of a device, a gateway, and the cloud.  IoT will allow humans and machines to operate more intelligently with data and insights.