AWS Launches Internet of Things Cloud Platform

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

In a highly anticipated announcement this week at AWS re:Invent, AWS announced a move into the Internet of Things (IoT) space on Thursday with the launch of AWS IoT, a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices interact with AWS services. The platform is currently in beta.

According to the announcement, devices connect to AWS IoT’s Device Gateway, and manufacturers set rules for what AWS IoT does with the data they send.

AWS IoT provides an SDK to make it easy for developers to use the AWS IoT functionality from connected devices, as well as mobile and web applications.

While it’s still relatively early days for IoT, AWS public cloud competitors like Microsoft Azure already have an IoT offering.

“The promise of the Internet of Things is to make everyday products smarter for consumers, and for businesses to enable better, data-driven offerings that weren’t possible before. World-leading organizations like Philips, NASA JPL, andSonos already use AWS services to support the back-end of their IoT applications,” Marco Argenti, Vice President, Mobile and IoT, AWS said in a statment. “Now, AWS IoT enables a whole ecosystem of manufacturers, service providers, and application developers to easily connect their products to the cloud at scale, take action on the data they collect, and create a new class of applications that interact with the physical world.”

As part of the announcement, a number of semiconductor manufacturers also have Starter Kits powered by AWS IoT that embed the AWS IoT Device SDK.

AWS is once again tapping its partners to help customers use its platform. AWS Partner Network Partners offer operating systems, management platforms, analytics and services that work with AWS IoT. Partnerships will certainly be a key strategy for adoption of AWS as it will need buy-in from manufacturers to be successful.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/aws-launches-internet-of-things-platform