AWS IoT Greengrass

What is AWS IoT Greengrass?

AWS IoT Greengrass is “an open-source edge runtime and cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software”. It is used as an extension of the AWS ecosystem to the edge. This is sometimes referred to as the “fog” between the centralized cloud (AWS) and the final end-consumer compute of IoT devices–though edge computing applications vary greatly.

A Greengrass application is split in two parts: the Greengrass device software that runs on edge devices to host Deployments and the AWS IoT Greengrass service that provides device and Deployment management capabilities in the cloud.

AWS IoT Greengrass Deployments are application bundles made of Components that are independent services that can communicate through the Inter Process Communication system provided by the device software. This device software provides many useful capabilities, including:

• Local Docker container hosting and cloud-based management
• MQTT Broker to provide messaging between local devices and AWS services
• Stream Manager to handle streaming of high volumes of data to the AWS cloud

There are many other components for log and application management, including industry-specific and custom components.

As of this writing, it costs $0.16 a month to run Greengrass on one connected edge device per month plus the cost of other AWS services the Greengrass application interacts with.

How Trek10 Can Help

Since Greengrass was released in 2017, we have implemented Greengrass applications for a variety of clients in the restaurant, medical, smart city, and government sectors. This has given us deep insights into how Greengrass (both v1 and v2) applications are assembled, and more importantly, how to manage those applications at scale. Our offerings and solutions help with the implementation, scaling, and deployment management of Greengrass workloads–ensuring that our clients have a reliable system and a quick time to market.