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.

Overview Some web applications are available only from the server they are running. In other words, they listen only for incoming connections from the local host. This means that even the administrator can not access them using a web browser running on another computer. Those are typically very important web applications with restricted access. One example of this kind of application is a web control panel running on the factory floor equipment.

Overview The X509 certificate registered in AWS is needed to connect a Device to the AWS IoT Core. The X509 certificate is used to authenticate the IoT Device. In other words, the Certificate is a proof of identity. To be precise, not the X509 Certificate itself, but the corresponding Private Key. That is why the Private Key should be generated and stored in a secure way on IoT Device. There are multiple ways to crate and register an X509 certificate in AWS.

Overview AWS IoT Thing Type helps organize, categorize, and search for IoT Things managed by the AWS IoT Thing Registry. This article is a continuation of my previous post - AWS IoT Thing Attributes - introduction All Things associated with a specific Thing Type have common attributes (like: manufacturer, serial number, color). To manage Thing Types we will use the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3). 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 import boto3 import json # A session manages state about a particular configuration.