AWS Greengrass IoT Service Officially Launched

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of the AWS Greengrass, the company’s Internet of Things service that allows customers to program and update IoT devices with AWS Lambda.

Greengrass is now available in the US East and US West regions of AWS.

This new service allows customers the ability to run AWS compute, messaging, data caching and sync capabilities on connected devices — essentially helping users process data on edge devices and communicate from them to the AWS cloud.

Developers can write functions that can be deployed on compatible devices, and then run in response to triggers from local hardware or the Amazon Web Services cloud. These functions make it possible to handle data processing without a network connection, which is important for IoT devices.

Greengrass also makes it possible to create secure connections between embedded hardware and the Amazon cloud, and customers can use this to pass data back and forth.

The service was launched in limited preview at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, late last year.

With this launch, Greengrass has beaten the Microsoft Azure IoT Edge service to general availability, which is sure to provide AWS with an edge against its immediate cloud rival.

And although it is now only available in the US East (North Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions, Amazon Web Services has plans to make it available in other regions including APAC, Frankfurt and Sydney in the coming weeks.

AWS also announced that more than a dozen partners are integrating AWS Greengrass into their hardware for devices that come with support for the technology built-in. These include names like Intel, Lenovo, Mongoose, Qualcomm, Raspberry Pi and Samsung, among others.

Intel, for example, announced a new IoT Dev Kit with Greengrass compatible gateways, while Qualcomm has already announced a DragonBoard 410c development kit that supports this new platform.

Other manufacturers are sure to do the same in the near future.