Building a slide deck, pitch, or presentation? Here are the big takeaways:

  • Amazon has announced general availability of AWS IoT Analytics, which can create reports based on raw, unstructured data generated by IoT devices.
  • AWS IoT Analytics is one piece of a larger IoT-focused push that Amazon embarked on at the Re:Invent 2017 conference.

Amazon has announced that AWS IoT Analytics, a service first introduced last November and December at Re:Invent 2017, has reached general availability. IoT Analytics enables developers to take the raw, unstructured data that IoT devices feed to AWS, and create reports based on that information, a press release said. These reports can be extended further by combining the IoT data with outside data, and can be used with an embedded SQL engine to provide answers about a given data set.

While AWS IoT Analytics has just reached general availability, the release is still going to be staggered. Presently, the service is available in US East-1 (N. Virginia), US East-2 (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions, with availability in other regions planned for a future release, the release noted.

SEE: Enterprise IoT calculator: TCO and ROI (Tech Pro Research)

One interesting integration announced with IoT Analytics is the Vuzix M300 augmented reality glasses, which can be used in industrial, medical, and retail scenarios. Data collected from the glasses can be transmitted to IoT Analytics for further analysis.

AWS IoT Analytics is one piece of a larger IoT-focused push that Amazon embarked on at the Re:Invent 2017 conference. At the conference, Amazon announced the release of Amazon FreeRTOS 10.0, a modified version of FreeRTOS with AWS and IoT specific libraries added. Importantly, with this release, Amazon FreeRTOS (and the standard FreeRTOS code) were released under the MIT license.

Previously, FreeRTOS was licensed under a modified GPLv2 license which, bizarrely, prohibited benchmarking, stating that the code “may not be used for any competitive or comparative purpose, including the publication of any form of run time or compile time metric.”

Richard Barry, the creator of FreeRTOS, has joined Amazon as a software engineer, which led to the change in licensing. Amazon noted at the time that “simplified licensing has long been requested by the FreeRTOS community,” adding that “The specific choice of the MIT license was based on the needs of the embedded systems community: the MIT license is commonly used in open hardware projects, and is generally whitelisted for enterprise use.”

Other IoT-focused services now provided by AWS include AWS IoT 1-Click, which allows for the creation of an AWS Lambda trigger to run a given function on an IoT device, as well as Device Defender, and Device Management services for protection, monitoring, and management of IoT devices at scale.