Amazon Launches Internet of Things Cloud Service

It’s official. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pulled the beta tag off its cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform, announced AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr on Dec. 18.

Dubbed AWS IoT, the offering enables organizations to link and manage their connected devices. Prices start at $5 per million messages. The AWS Free Tier plan includes 250,000 messages per month for 12 months.

During the AWS IoT beta, Barr noted that his company added an AWS Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) for iOS – an Android version is in the works— along with IPv6 support on AWS IoT Device Gateway. Now it’s ready for primetime.

According to Barr, AWS IoT is a natural progression for the e-commerce giant, device maker and cloud innovator.

“Like some of our more advanced customers, we have been building systems around connected devices for quite some time,” wrote Barr in a company blog post. “Our experience with Amazon Robotics, drones (Amazon Prime Air), the Amazon Echo, the Dash Button, and multiple generations of Kindles has given us a well-informed perspective on how to serve this really important emerging market.”

It helps that the Seattle, Wash. company got an early start in building up its enterprise cloud services slate.

“Behind the scenes, AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Redshift provide the responsive, highly scalable infrastructure needed to build a robust IoT application,” continued Barr.

Two companies are already putting Amazon’s cloud IoT tech through its paces, said Barr. Philips HealthSuite is using the platform to collect, store and analyze 15 petabytes (PB) of patient health data. Scout Alarm, a maker of self-contained wireless home security systems, is using AWS IoT to support its mobile-enabled devices.

Of course, Amazon isn’t the only tech heavyweight betting on IoT.

On Sept. 29, fellow Seattle-area tech giant Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure IoT Suite. As a collection of preconfigured solutions, Azure IoT Suite is aimed at helping businesses quickly kick off their IoT projects and begin connecting thousands of devices.

In March, IBM announced that it was investing $3 billion over four years to pursue the IoT opportunity. “There’s an opportunity to inform all business operations and decision-making with real-time actionable insight delivered securely via the cloud and extracted from all this data collected from sensors all over the planet,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president of IBM Analytics, in a statement at the time.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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