Amazon Web Services has announced AWS Greengrass and AWS Snowball Edge, two products designed to simplify the interaction between IoT devices and the AWS cloud.

AWS Greengrass is designed to eliminate the complexity involved in programming and updating IoT devices. It does this by allowing devices to run AWS Lambda functions, performing them locally in the same way they do within the AWS cloud, while ensuring that device data is kept in sync and that communication with other devices is maintained.

AWS Greengrass also includes AWS IoT messaging to enable communications with other edge devices without connecting back to the cloud.

According to AWS, Greengrass works on almost any device with a general-purpose CPU that runs Ubuntu or Amazon Linux, and also supports ARM and x86 architectures.

A number of companies are already integrating AWS Greengrass into their platforms, including Intel, Qualcomm and Annapurna Labs.

AWS Snowball Edge is a data transfer appliance that builds on the original AWS Snowball, doubling its predecessor’s data transfer capabilities, bringing it to 100 terabytes.

It also has four times the network speed of the original AWS Snowball, along with built-in Wi-Fi and cellular wireless communication.

AWS Snowball Edge includes AWS Greengrass, turning devices into purpose-built hybrid devices that can transfer data to and from Amazon’s S3 storage service, cluster with other Snowball Edge devices to form an on-premise storage pool, and run AWS Lambda to process and analyse data.

Marco Argenti, AWS Vice President of Mobile and IoT, said in a statement: “For our customers who are pioneering large-scale IoT deployments, connected devices represent a growing percentage of their infrastructure, and as they move quickly to migrate their servers to the cloud, these IoT devices will become the primary on-premises infrastructure customers are managing – this is the next generation of hybrid IT.”

“AWS Greengrass makes this possible by putting a ‘mini AWS,’ a select set of AWS capabilities, inside connected devices. With AWS Lambda and AWS IoT messaging and security, customers can run IoT applications seamlessly across local IoT devices and the AWS Cloud using the same programming model.”

Bill Vass, AWS VP of Storage Services, added: “We are excited to introduce AWS Snowball Edge, a true hybrid edge device. Not only does it allow customers to transport 100 TB of data in less than a week, but Snowball Edge also gives them the flexibility to transfer data back and forth between the Snowball Edge’s location and Amazon S3, to cluster Snowballs into an on-premises storage pool, and to process data on-premises before shipping the Snowball Edge back to AWS.”