I often say that the IoT Thing is a virtual representation of a physical device or logical entity (for instance, an application).
Today, I want to be more specific than that.
The IoT Thing stores the metadata describing the IoT Device.
By metadata, I mean:
- Thing Name
- Thing Attributes
- Thing Type
- Thing Group
- Device Shadow
But IoT Thing does not store the identity of a related IoT Device.
The X.509 Certificate registered in the AWS IoT Core represents the connected IoT Device.
IoT Device uses its Private Key and X.509 Certificate (the same as registered in AWS IoT Core) as Proof of Identity.
Probably that is obvious to everyone, but I wanted to make a clear distinction between the purposes of IoT Thing and X.509 Certificate in AWS IoT Core.
