At its annual Re:Invent shindig, Amazon announced that it now has 10,000's of IoT customers, with more than half a billion devices sending more than half a trillion messages a month into AWS IoT core. They have open-sourced the edge software for Amazon GreenGrass (which lets you run lambdas on edge devices and stream into the AWS cloud) and now guarantee 2 years' support for their FreeRTOS device software. AWS IoT Core also now supports LoRaWAN natively (which includes Amazon's Sidewalk network), so there's no need to build your own network server, making LoRAWAN a 1^st-class network layer for AWS users.

But for us at DevicePilot, the most notable announcement at Re:Invent was Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management. Fleet Hub is an on-rails user interface which allows operational users to see what's going on with the device estate. It bears more than a passing similarity to DevicePilot, and we believe that Amazon's endorsement of Service Monitoring represents the starting gun for the category. Read more about Fleet Hub here.

As a recap of what Service Monitoring is, and why you need it, and which parts of it you need at different stages in your journey, read this refresher.

By the way, Azure IoT doesn't have an equivalent Service Monitoring offering yet, though their Jobs function does provides some ways to do just Device Management at scale.

In other news:

• Making energy-harvesting practical for IoT is still a thing, even for relatively power-hungry LTE-M/NB-IoT cellular modules. Getting rid of the battery will transform so many IoT applications.
• 1nce, who provide a "$10 for the life of the product" IoT connectivity, now offer "first year's comms free" within AWS Marketplace (max 100 SIMs each!)
• Wireless Logic acquires rival IoT comms company Arkessa
• Four years after launch, Google kills-off Android Things
• Finally, analyst IoT Analytics produced a great roundup of IoT in 2020 including the assessment that in 2020 the number of IoT devices (11.7bn) finally surpassed the number of non-IoT connected devices such as smartphones - and predicts it will go on to exceed 30bn by 2025.

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

P.S. This is my 22nd monthly IoT update. Sign up to have it delivered to you monthly here.