Item: AWS IoT Core
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IoT to integrate with on-prem warehouse technologies. It is a scalable system for building a complete solution for smarter device integration, management, observability and monitoring. As a multi-faceted offering with direct integration to other AWS services we are able to solve a wide variety of novel problems that arise for our specific use-cases

Pros and Cons

It integrates nicely with other AWS offerings
It has a wide range of capabilities
It has good integration with AI

It would be great to have better integration with other IoT products outside of AWS
It has been lagging in some of our applications. It's difficult to tell whether this is on AWS IoT or on our implementation
It would be great to support a wider range of protocols

Most Important Features

documentation is top notch. This is important for our organization
wide adoption means there is a good community around this and we find that useful as well
Integration with MQTT is important for our use cases
FreeRTOS is a nice feature for us
device management dashboard is a slam dunk

Return on Investment

it was required to have an IoT solution for our use case, so in that way positive
The cost structure is a bit unwieldy, which I'll call negative
It has been reliable for us and I'll call that positive

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud IoT

For our use case, we ended up with AWS because the human resources that were planning to be resourced on this particular project happened to have prior familiarity with the AWS ecosystem. The conversation became can we justify continuing with this ecosystem rather than pivoting to a different one - such as GCP or Azure. We decided that the functionality offered by AWS was sufficient for our use case. I think that it is often underestimated how important it is to have prior familiarity with a cloud ecosystem when evaluating vendors.

Key Insights

Do you think AWS IoT Core delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AWS IoT Core's feature set?

Yes

Did AWS IoT Core live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AWS IoT Core go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AWS IoT Core again?

Yes

Other Software Used

AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail

Likelihood to Recommend

FreeRTOS (real-time kernel operating system for embedded devices) is a handy feature. If you care about that you should consider using this product. If you are on a tight budget I would recommend at least having a very clear understanding of the pricing structure before proceeding with this product as the cost structure is not the simplest or clearest and you may end up inadvertently incurring more costs than you initially intended to. This is generally the case with AWS offerings - IoT is no exception

AWS IoT: sufficient for our use case and compatible with our core competencies

Overall Satisfaction with AWS IoT Core