Blog > What is AWS IoT Greengrass Technology
Building device software can be a long process. Customers often find themselves reinventing the wheel device builders want to easily build, deploy and manage device software for use in homes, factories, vehicles, and businesses. This requires developing and debugging applications on a variety of test devices and deploying software to millions of devices globally.
AWS IoT Greengrass technology helps us accelerate time to market and reduce costs in two ways; first, it lets its users quickly build intelligent device software with a robust edge runtime. Second, it lets its users remotely deploy and manage device software.
AWS IoT Greengrass
AWS IoT Greengrass brings cloud programming and functionality to two sets of IoT devices, empowering them to communicate and react when a cloud connection is impossible. These devices together are known as the Greengrass group. The groups are always defining and configure from the cloud. In this case, the group is defined around a manufacturing site. The first step in creating a new group is to establish a Greengrass core in this cloud definition.
AWS Greengrass Group
An AWS Greengrass group is a set of cores, and it can configure other devices to communicate with one another.
Every group needs the Greengrass core to function properly. Adding a core to the cloud definition of a group represents a physical device on which the user can install Greengrass core software that core software securely connects the device to AWS installed by the user on their core device. The AWS IoT Greengrass user can also define their group in the cloud; the user can add other provisioned AWS IoT devices to their group definition or AWS lambda functions.
Simple programs that can process or respond to data. The user can build and edit their definitions safely in the cloud and then deploy their group to make it functional once the user deploys their groups’ devices and programs can communicate and react even without the connection to the cloud.
AWS IoT Greengrass enables local processing, messaging data management, and ML inference and offers pre-built components and building blocks to help in the development of edge applications.
Security
AWS IoT Greengrass provides a secure way to seamlessly connect the edge devices to any AWS service such as Amazon Kinesis, CloudWatch, or S3 and third-party services.
Once software development is complete, the user can deploy and manage their software on millions of devices without needing a firmware update.
IoT Devices
Greengrass works with IoT to maintain long-lived connections and process data via the rules engine. The IoT devices have a long life span, and updating software remotely is critical in keeping devices up to date and making them smarter over time. The user can install the AWS IoT Greengrass client software on IoT devices or hubs. Hubs allow other edge devices to communicate with each other even without a cloud connection.
AWS IoT Greengrass helps build and manage device software, allowing users to invest more time and energy in their core value proposition.
Greengrass Components
- Greengrass Core
- IoT devises SDK
AWS Greengrass Core (GGC)
The runtime is responsible for Lambda execution, messaging, device shadows, security, and interacting directly with the cloud.
IoT Device SDK
Any device that uses the IoT device SDK can be configured to interact with AWS Greengrass Core via the local network.
AWS Greengrass Capabilities
- Device-first development
- Composability of optional features
- Flexibility and extensibility
- Use any execution model (Lambda, Docker, OS processes, snap, VMs)
- Supports all programming languages and protocols
- Bring in user’s runtime, packages, and open-source components
- Lifecycle Management
- Simplified management for device fleets
- Data and state sync
- Over the air updates
- Local messaging
- Local actions
- Container supports
Author: SVCIT Editorial Copyright
Silicon Valley Cloud IT, LLC.