3 Reasons to Scale AWS IoT Greengrass with EdgeIQ

With EdgeIQ, you can focus your resources on the layers of your product stack that are most strategic. You will never have to waste time building undifferentiated device management, integration, and automation software. Beyond the functional capabilities you need, we make it easy to incorporate DeviceOps throughout your product development, field service, finance, business, and customer operations. The IoT world is hard. We make it much easier.

This July, we gave you the rundown on how we help you simplify and scale AWS IoT Greengrass implementations. Now, we’re delving into why, if you’re an AWS IoT Greengrass user, you need the EdgeIQ platform.

The AWS IoT Greengrass edge runtime and cloud service is a great way to build, deploy, and manage intelligent device software, but it’s only a small part of a holistic DeviceOps workflow. Anybody who has ever touched Greengrass knows it’s easy to get a proof of concept going, but once you start scaling the implementation, things quickly get messy.

If you try to orchestrate, manage, control, and integrate it into your device environment and workflow on your own, you’ll be continuously installing the service on your edge devices and taking care of updates, rather than having every “Thing” do its thang and be continuously up and running.

Job security for your developers and engineers? Certainly. But they should be focused on more strategic things like proprietary firmware or kick-ass applications. Good for advancing your Connected Product Business? Not so much.

One of our customers noted that, for him, there are 19 steps to follow to configure and deploy AWS IoT Greengrass onto a single device. Installing the service is complex and time-consuming, not only in activating the service, but also in ensuring it is continuously up and running. It is also a somewhat manual process, introducing potential errors at each implementation instance. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Wanted: management and orchestration
Don’t get us wrong: AWS IoT Greengrass is a terrific launchpad, but getting the rocket into space takes a lot more. If you take it upon yourself to flesh out the AWS edge runtime so it’s part of your DeviceOps workflow, then you will rack up exorbitant, ongoing engineering costs and constant headaches with keeping up, a.k.a. versionitis.

And speaking of versionitis, Amazon just announced AWS IoT Greengrass version 2. It adds a lot of goodies, such as an open-source edge runtime, improved modularity, new development tools, and improved fleet deployment features. In other words, it changed your entire DeviceOps workflow, and your developers now have a to-do list as long as the Nile.

So, instead of building the car from the ground up by buying an engine, transmission, exhaust system, and so on, let EdgeIQ seamlessly stitch AWS IoT Greengrass and all the other pieces of your DeviceOps workflow together to simplify management and orchestration. Remember: in this instance, it’s better to buy than build. https://www.edgeiq.ai/blog/homemade-is-for-cookies-not-device-management-software

With EdgeIQ, you no longer need to worry about establishing processes and allocating time to installation, monitoring, and maintenance of your AWS IoT Greengrass deployment. EdgeIQ automates onboarding of new devices for speed, scalability, and security — and, we seamlessly deploy, monitor, and update AWS IoT Greengrass.

Here are the top three reasons your business will thank you for deploying EdgeIQ to scale your AWS IoT Greengrass implementation:

1. You can better serve customers. We automatically create alerts and trigger restarts if your AWS IoT Greengrass installation stops working, so you can be back in business in no time.
2. You save costs. The EdgeIQ platform automates the previously manual or code-intensive tasks of creating devices in your AWS account, storing and managing certificates, and establishing communication with newly activated devices, so onboarding is painless. We not only put AWS IoT Greengrass on autopilot, but we also do the heavy lifting of updates related to security, scalability, integrations with new AWS IoT Greengrass, and so on — and that translates directly to cost savings.
3. You accelerate time-to-market. Your developers and engineering teams can get to work on firmware, device design, and the other facets that make your company hum. You create more innovative products and services, much faster, because nobody’s toiling away deploying AWS IoT Greengrass across countless thousands of devices.

And, side note: remember the customer who had to take 19 steps to configure and deploy AWS IoT Greengrass onto a single device? It now takes two — and we can do the same for you.

Like DevOps, DeviceOps is a set of processes that can be unified, simplified, and automated with the right software, and EdgeIQ owns it. Our mission is to propel organizations into the Connected Product Economy and help them excel once they are there. It’s easy to get started. Talk to us.