Core Tenets of IoT

April 2016

Amazon Web Services Core Tenets of IoT

April 2016

2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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current product offerings and practices as of the date of issue of this document,
which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for
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and its customers.

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Contents
Abstract

Overview

Core Tenets of IoT

Agility

Scalability and Global Footprint

Cost

Security

AWS Services for IoT Solutions

AWS IoT

Event Driven Services

Automation and DevOps

10

Administration and Security

11

Bringing Services and Solutions Together

Pragma Architecture

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12
13

Summary

14

Contributors

15

Further Reading

15

Notes

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Amazon Web Services Core Tenets of IoT

April 2016

Abstract
This paper outlines core tenets that should be considered when developing a
strategy for the Internet of Things (IoT). The paper helps customers understand
the benefits of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and how the AWS cloud platform
can be the critical component supporting the core tenets of an IoT solution. The
paper also provides an overview of AWS services that should be part of an overall
IoT strategy. This paper is intended for decision makers who are learning about
Internet of Things platforms.

Overview
One of the value propositions of an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy is the ability
to provide insight into context that was previously invisible to the business. But
before a business can develop a strategy for IoT, it needs a platform that meets
the foundational principles of an IoT solution.
AWS believes in some basic freedoms that are driving organizational and
economic benefits of the cloud into businesses. These freedoms are why more
than a million customers already use the AWS platform to support virtually any
cloud workload. These freedoms are also why the AWS platform is proving itself
as the primary catalyst to any Internet of Things strategy across commercial,
consumer, and industrial solutions.
AWS customers working across such a spectrum of solutions have identified core
tenets vital to the success of any IoT platform. These core tenets are agility, scale,
cost, and security; which have been shown as essential to the long-term success of
any IoT strategy.
This whitepaper defines these tenets as:

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Agility The freedom to quickly analyze, execute, and build business and
technical initiatives in an unfettered fashion

Scale Seamlessly expand infrastructure regionally or globally to meet

operational demands

Cost Understand and control the costs of operating an IoT platform

Security Secure communication from device through cloud while

maintaining compliance and iterating rapidly

Amazon Web Services Core Tenets of IoT

April 2016

By using the AWS platform, companies are able to build agile solutions that can
scale to meet exponential device growth, with an ability to manage cost, while
building on top of some of the most secure computing infrastructure in the world.
A company that selects a platform that has these freedoms and promotes these
core tenets will improve organizational focus on the differentiators of its business
and the strategic value of implementing solutions within the Internet of Things.

Core Tenets of IoT

Agility
A leading benefit companies seek when creating an IoT solution is the ability to
efficiently quantify opportunities. These opportunities are derived from reliable
sensor data, remote diagnostics, and remote command and control between users
and devices. Companies that can effectively collect these metrics open the door to
explore different business hypotheses based on their IoT data. For example,
manufacturers can build predictive analytics solutions to measure, test, and tune
the ideal maintenance cycle for their products over time. The IoT lifecycle is
comprised of multiple stages that are required to procure, manufacture, onboard,
test, deploy, and manage large fleets of physical devices. When developing
physical devices, the waterfall-like process introduces challenges and friction that
can slow down business agility. This friction coupled with the up-front hardware
costs of developing and deploying physical assets at scale often result in the
requirement to keep devices in the field for long periods of time to achieve the
necessary return on investment (ROI).
With the ever-growing challenges and opportunities that face companies today, a
companys IT division is a competitive differentiator that supports business
performance, product development, and operations. In order for a companys IoT
strategy to be a competitive advantage, the IT organization relies on having a
broad set of tools that promote interoperability throughout the IoT solution and
among a heterogeneous mix of devices. Companies that can achieve a successful
balance between the waterfall processes of hardware releases and the agile
methodologies of software development, can continuously optimize the value
thats derived from their IoT strategy.

Scalability and Global Footprint

Along with an exponential growth of connected devices, each thing in the
Internet of Things communicates packets of data that require reliable
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connectivity and durable storage. Prior to cloud platforms, IT departments would

procure additional hardware and maintain underutilized, overprovisioned
capacity in order to handle the increasing growth of data emitted by devices, also
known as telemetry. With IoT, an organization is challenged with managing,
monitoring, and securing the immense number of network connections from
these dispersed, connected devices.
In addition to scaling and growing a solution in one regional location, IoT
solutions require the ability to scale globally and across different physical
locations. IoT solutions should be deployed in multiple physical locations to meet
the business objectives of a global enterprise solution such as data compliance,
data sovereignty, and lower communication latency for better responsiveness
from devices in the field.

Cost
Often the greatest value of an IoT solution is in the telemetric and contextual data
that is generated and sent from devices. Building on-premise infrastructure
requires upfront capital purchase of hardware; it can be a large, fixed expense
that does not directly correlate to the value of the telemetry that a device will
produce sometime in the future. To balance the need to receive telemetry today
with an uncertain value derived from telemetric data in the future, an IoT
strategy should leverage an elastic and scalable cloud platform. With the AWS
platform, a company pays only for the services it consumes without requiring a
long-term contract. By leveraging a flexible, consumption based pricing model,
the cost of an IoT solution and the related infrastructure can be directly accessed
alongside the business value delivered by ingesting, processing, storing, and
analyzing the telemetry received by that same IoT solution.

Security
The foundation of an IoT solution starts and ends with security. Since devices
may send large amounts of sensitive data and end users of IoT applications may
also have the ability to directly control a device, the security of things must be a
pervasive design requirement. IoT solutions should not just be designed with
security in mind, but with security controls permeating every layer of the
solution. Security is not a static formula; IoT applications must be able to
continuously model, monitor, and iterate on security best practices. In the
Internet of Things, the attack surface is different than traditional web
infrastructure. The pervasiveness of ubiquitous computing means that IoT

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vulnerabilities could lead to exploits that result in the loss of life, for example
from a compromised control system for gasoline pipelines or power grids.
A competing dynamic for IoT security is the lifecycle of a physical device and the
constrained hardware for sensors, microcontrollers, actuators, and embedded
libraries. These constrained factors may limit the security capabilities each device
can perform. With these additional dynamics, IoT solutions must continuously
adapt their architecture, firmware, and software to stay ahead of the changing
security landscape. Although the constrained factors of devices can present
increased risks, hurdles and potential tradeoffs between security and cost,
building a secure IoT solution must be the primary objective for any organization.

AWS Services for IoT Solutions

The AWS platform provides a foundation for executing an agile, scalable, secure
and cost-effective IoT strategy. In order to achieve the business value that IoT can
bring to an organization, customers should evaluate the breadth and depth of
AWS services that are commonly used in large-scale, distributed IoT
deployments. AWS provides a range of services to accelerate time to market:
from device SDKs for embedded software, to real-time data processing and eventdriven compute services.
In these sections, we will cover the most common AWS services used in IoT
applications, and how these services correspond to the core tenets of an IoT
solution.

AWS IoT
The Internet of Things cannot exist without things. Every IoT solution must first
establish connectivity in order to begin interacting with devices. AWS IoT is an
AWS managed service that addresses the challenges of connecting, managing,
and operating large fleets of devices for an application. The combination of
scalability of connectivity and security mechanisms for data transmission within
AWS IoT provides a foundation for IoT communication as part of an IoT solution.
Once data has been sent to AWS IoT, a solution is able to leverage an ecosystem
of AWS services spanning databases, mobile services, big data, analytics, machine
learning and more.

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Device Gateway
A device gateway is responsible for maintaining the sessions and subscriptions
for all connected devices in an IoT solution. The AWS IoT Device Gateway
enables secure, bi-directional communication between connected devices and the
AWS platform over MQTT, WebSockets, and HTTP. Communication protocols
such as MQTT and HTTP enable a company to utilize industry standard protocols
instead of using a proprietary protocol that would limit future interoperability.
As a publish and subscribe protocol, MQTT inherently encourages scalable, faulttolerant communication patterns and fosters a wide range of communication
options among devices and the Device Gateway. These message patterns range
from communication between two devices to broadcast patterns where one
device can send a message to a large field of devices over a shared topic. In
addition, the MQTT protocol exposes different levels of Quality of Service (QoS)
to control the retransmission and delivery of messages as they are published to
subscribers. The combination of publish and subscribe with QoS not only opens
the possibilities for IoT solutions to control how devices interact in a solution, but
also drive more predictability in how messages are delivered, acknowledged, and
retried in the event of network or device failures.

Shadows, Device Registry, and Rules Engine

AWS IoT consists of additional features that are essential to building a robust IoT
application. The AWS IoT service includes the Rules Engine, which is capable of
filtering, transforming, and forwarding device messages as they are received by
the Device Gateway. The Rules Engine utilizes a SQL-based syntax that selects
data from message payloads and triggers actions based on the characteristics of
the IoT data. AWS IoT also provides a Device Shadow that maintains a virtual
representation of a device. The Device Shadow acts as a message channel to send
commands reliably to a device, and store the last-known state of a device in the
AWS platform.
For managing the lifecycle of a fleet of devices, AWS IoT has a Device Registry.
The Device Registry is the central location for storing and querying a predefined
set of attributes related to each thing. The Device Registry supports the creation
of a holistic management view for an IoT solution to control the associations
between things, shadows, permissions, and identities.

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Security and Identity

For connected devices, an IoT platform should utilize concepts of identity, least
privilege, encryption, and authorization throughout the hardware and software
development lifecycle. AWS IoT encrypts traffic to and from the service over
Transport Layer Security (TLS) with support for most major cipher suites. For
identification, AWS IoT requires a connected device to authenticate using a
X.509 certificate. Each certificate must be provisioned, activated, and then
installed on a device before it can be used as a valid identity with AWS IoT. In
order to support this separation of identity and access for devices, AWS IoT
provides IoT Policies for device identities. AWS IoT also utilizes AWS Identity
and Access Management (AWS IAM) policies for AWS users, groups, and roles.
By using IoT Policies, an organization has control over allowing and denying
communications on IoT topics for each specific devices identity. AWS IoT
policies, certificates, and AWS IAM are designed for explicit, whitelist
configuration of the communication channels of every device in a companys
AWS IoT ecosystem.

Event Driven Services

In order to achieve the tenets of scalability and flexibility in an IoT solution, an
organization should incorporate the techniques of an event-driven architecture.
An event-driven architecture fosters scalable and decoupled communication
through the creation, storage, consumption, and reaction to events of interest
that occur in an IoT solution. Messages that are generated in an IoT solution
should first be categorized and mapped to a series of events. An IoT solution
should then associate these events with business logic that executes commands
and possibly generates additional events in the IoT system. The AWS platform
provides several application services for building a distributed, event-driven IoT
architecture.
Foundationally event-driven architectures rely on the ability to durably store and
transfer events through an ecosystem of interested subscribers. In order to
support decoupled event orchestration, the AWS platform has several application
services that are designed for reliable event storage and highly scalable event
driven computation. An event-driven IoT solution should utilize Amazon Simple
Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon
SNS), and AWS Lambda as foundational application components for creating
simple and complex event workflows. Amazon SQS is a fast, durable, scalable,
and fully managed message queuing service. Amazon SNS is a web service that
publishes messages from an application and immediately delivers them to
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subscribers or other applications. AWS Lambda is designed to run code in

response to events while the underlying computer resources are automatically
managed. AWS Lambda can receive and respond to notifications directly from
other AWS services. In an event-driven IoT architecture, AWS Lambda is where
the business logic is executed to determine when events of interest have occurred
in the context of an IoT ecosystem.
AWS services such as Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and AWS Lambda can separate
the consuming of events from the processing and business logic applied to those
events. This separation of responsibilities creates flexibility and agility in an endto-end solution. This separation enables the rapid modification of event trigger
logic or the logic used to aggregate contextual data between parts of a system.
Finally, this separation allows changes to be introduced in an IoT solution
without blocking the continuous stream of data being sent between end devices
and the AWS platform.

Automation and DevOps

In IoT solutions, the initial release of an application is the beginning of a longterm approach to constantly refine the business advantages of an IoT strategy.
After the first release of an application, a majority of time and effort will be spent
adding new features to the current IoT solution. With the tenet of remaining agile
throughout the solution lifecycle, customers should evaluate services that enable
rapid development and deployment as business needs change. Unlike traditional
web architectures where DevOps technologies only apply to the backend servers,
an IoT application will also require the ability to incrementally roll-out changes
to disparate, globally connected devices. With the AWS platform, a company can
implement server-side and device-side DevOps practices to automate operations.
Applications deployed in the AWS cloud platform can take advantage of several
DevOps technologies on AWS. For an overview of AWS DevOps, we recommend
reviewing the document Introduction to DevOps on AWS 1. Although most
solutions will differ in deployment and operations requirements, IoT solutions
can utilize AWS CloudFormation to define their server-side infrastructure as
code. Infrastructure treated as code has the benefits of being reproducible,
testable, and more easily deployable across other AWS regions. Enterprise
organizations that utilize AWS CloudFormation in addition to other DevOps tools
greatly increase their agility and pace of application changes.

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In order to design an IoT solution that adheres to the tenets of security and
agility, organizations must also update their connected devices after they have
been deployed into the environment. Firmware updates provide a company a
mechanism to add new features to a device and are a critical path for delivering
security patches during the lifetime of a device. To implement firmware updates
to connected devices, an IoT solution should first store the firmware in a globally
accessible service such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for
secure, durable, highly-scalable cloud storage. Then the IoT solution can
implement Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network (CDN) service,
to bring the the firmware stored in Amazon S3 to the lower latency points of
presence for connected devices. Finally, a customer can leverage the AWS IoT
Shadow to push a command to a device to request that it download the new
version of firmware from a pre-signed Amazon CloudFront URL that restricts
access to the firmware objects available through the CDN. Once the upgrade is
complete the device should acknowledge success by sending a message back into
the IoT solution. By orchestrating this small set of services for firmware updates
customers control their Device DevOps approach and can scale it in a way that
aligns with their overall IoT strategy.
In IoT, automation and DevOps procedures expand beyond the application
services that are deployed in the AWS platform and include the connected devices
that have been deployed as part of the overall IoT architecture. By designing a
system that can easily perform regular and global updates for new software
changes and firmware changes, organizations can iterate on ways to increase
value from their IoT solution and to continuously innovate as new market
opportunities arise.

Administration and Security

Security in IoT is more than data anonymization; it is the ability to have insight,
auditability, and control throughout a system. IoT security includes the capability
to monitor events throughout the solution, and react to those events to achieve
the desired compliance and governance. Security at AWS is our number one
priority. Through the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, an organization has the
flexibility, agility, and control to implement their security requirements. 2 AWS
manages the security of the cloud, while customers are responsible for security
in the cloud. Customers maintain control over what security mechanisms they
implement to protect their data, applications, devices, systems and networks. In
addition, companies can leverage the broad set of security and administrative

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tools that AWS and AWS partners provide to create a strong, logically isolated,
and secure IoT solution for a fleet of devices.
The first service that should be enabled for monitoring and visibility is AWS
CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is a web service that records AWS API calls for an
account and delivers log files to Amazon S3. After enabling AWS CloudTrail, a
solution should build security and governance processes that are based on the
real-time input from API calls made across an AWS account. AWS CloudTrail
provides an additional level of visibility and flexibility in creating and iterating on
operational openness in a system.
In addition to logging API calls, customers should enable Amazon CloudWatch
for all AWS services used in the system. Amazon CloudWatch allows applications
to monitor AWS metrics and create custom metrics generated by an application.
These metrics can then trigger alerts based off of those events. Along with
Amazon CloudWatch metrics, there are Amazon CloudWatch Logs, which store
additional logs from AWS services or customer applications, and can then trigger
events based off of those additional metrics. AWS services, such as AWS IoT,
directly integrate with Amazon CloudWatch Logs; these logs can be dynamically
read as a stream of data and processed using the business logic and context of the
system for real-time anomaly detection or security threats.
By pairing services like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudTrail with the
capabilities of AWS IoT identities and policies, a company can immediately
collect valuable data around security practices at the start of the IoT strategy and
meet the needs for a proactive implementation of security within their IoT
solution.

Bringing Services and Solutions Together

To better understand customer usage, predict future trends, or run an IoT fleet
more efficiently, an organization needs to collect and process the potentially vast
amount of data gathered from connected devices in addition to connecting with
and managing large fleets of things.
AWS provides a breadth of services for collecting and analyzing large scale
datasets often called big data. These services may be integrated tightly within an
IoT solution to support collecting, processing, and analyzing the solutions data,
as well as proving or disproving hypotheses based upon IoT data. The ability to

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formulate and answer questions with the same platform one is using to manage
fleets of things ultimately empowers an organization to avoid undifferentiated
work and to unlock business innovations in an agile fashion.
The high-level, cohesive architectural perspective of an IoT solution that brings
IoT, big data and other services together is called the Pragma Architecture. The
Pragma Architecture is comprised of layers of solutions:

Things - The device and fleet of devices

Control Layer - The control point for access to the Speed Layer and the
nexus for fleet management

Speed Layer - The inbound, high-bandwidth device telemetry data bus and
the outbound device command bus

Serving Layer - The access point for systems and humans to interact with
the devices in a fleet, to perform analysis, archive, and correlate data, and
to use real-time views of the fleet.

Pragma Architecture

The Pragma Architecture is a single cohesive perspective of how the core tenets of
IoT manifest as an IoT solution when using AWS services.
One scenario of a Pragma Architecture based IoT Solution is around processing
of data emitted by devices; data also known as telemetry. In the diagram above,
after a device authenticates using a device certificate obtained from the AWS IoT

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service in the control layer, the device regularly sends telemetry data to the AWS
IoT Device Gateway in the Speed Layer. That telemetry data is then processed by
the IoT Rules Engine as an event to be output by Amazon Kinesis or AWS
Lambda for use by web users interacting with the serving layer.
Another scenario of a Pragma Architecture based IoT Solution is to send a
command to a device. In the diagram above, the users application would write
the desired command value to the target devices IoT Shadow. Then the AWS IoT
Shadow and the Device Gateway work together to overcome an intermittent
network to convey the command to the specific device.
These are just two device-focused scenarios from a broad tapestry of solutions
that fit the Pragma Architecture. Neither of these scenarios address the need to
process the potentially vast amount of data gathered from connected devices, this
is where having an integrated Big Data Backend starts to become important. The
Big Data Backend in this diagram is congruent with the entire ecosystem of realtime and batch-mode big data solutions that customers already leverage the AWS
platform to create. Simply put, from the big data perspective IoT telemetry equals
ingested data in big data solutions. If youd like to learn more about big data
solutions on AWS, please check below for a link to further reading.
There is a colorful and broad tapestry of big data solutions that companies have
already created using the AWS platform. The Pragma Architecture shows that by
building an IoT solution on that same platform, the entire ecosystem of big data
solutions is available.

Summary
Defining your Internet of Things strategy can be a truly transformational
endeavor that opens the door for unique business innovations. As organizations
start striving for their own IoT innovations, it is critical to select a platform that
promotes the core tenets: business and technical agility, scalability, cost, and
security. The AWS platform over-delivers on the core tenets of an IoT solution by
not just providing IoT services, but offering those services alongside a broad,
deep, and highly regarded set of platform services across a global footprint. This
over-delivery also brings freedoms that increase your business control over its
own destiny and enables your business IoT solutions to more rapidly iterate
toward the outcomes sought in your IoT strategy.

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As next steps in evaluating IoT platforms, we recommend the further reading

section below to learn more about AWS IoT, big data solutions on AWS, and
customer case studies on AWS.

Contributors
The following individuals authored this document:

Olawale Oladehin, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

Brett Francis, Principal Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

Further Reading
For additional reading, please consult the following sources:

AWS IoT Service

Getting Started with AWS IoT

AWS Case Studies

Big Data Analytics Options on AWS

Notes

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https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_DevOps.pdf

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-model/