I often speak about providing business value using IoT solutions. My code is running on the factory floor equipment, medical devices, and in other environments. But do I really understand the end users? When medical devices were saving the lives of my kids, I realized that a single firmware/software bug might impact that process. Not every connected device is life/mission-critical, but someone or something depends on it. How should your system behave when it can not gather the required data?

Overview AWS IoT Greengrass is an open source Internet of Things edge runtime and cloud service. It enables efficient management of a huge fleet of IoT devices (called Greengrass Core Devices) and remote deployment + execution of applications at the edge. To provide those capabilities, Greengrass needs to be authorized to access other AWS Services. In this post, I will present the minimal set of privileges required for the Greengrass Core Device to operate.

I know many people that promote the following approach: “Fake it until you make it!” I strongly disagree with that statement as it puts the customer and/or end consumer at a huge risk. When someone “fakes it” (pretends to have required skills, knowledge, experience, etc.) and hopes to learn everything during the development, the final product will “break” sooner or later. That is why I think it should be called:

I often read/hear discussions “Edge vs Cloud”. The “Edge vs Cloud” is not a real conversation in the IoT space. Arguments in favor of the Edge: IoT devices operate at the Edge. data is generated and gathered at the Edge. Edge deployment ensures minimum latency for real-time applications. All of the above statements are true. Devices live at the Edge, gather data using sensors, and impact the environment using actuators.

I co-authored a post published on the official AWS IoT blog. I described the automated approach to rotate x509 certificates used by IoT devices. The proposed solution leverages managed AWS services and MQTT communication. That is a quite advanced topic, feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/iot/how-to-manage-iot-device-certificate-rotation-using-aws-iot/

How to build an (IoT) prototype, and do it right? Sometimes it is hard/impossible to define clear functional requirements at the very beginning of an IoT project. The business owners have a high-level concept of what is needed; design meetings are not very productive due to a lack of common understanding between business and technical participants. Finally, everyone gets tired of that initiative and project is closed. Yet another failed IoT initiative.