Amazon Web Services will hold its annual Australian AWS Summit in Sydney on 11 and 12 April at Sydney’s International Convention Centre, preceded this year by the Amazon Innovation Day, described as “a new event for practical innovation leaders.”

Lee Hickin, AWS IoT business development leader, APAC, says AWS will use its Sydney Summit to help customers realise the potential for IoT in real world, industrial use cases.

“We understand that for many IoT use cases, IoT data needs to be collected, processed and actioned at the edge – where the customer’s business runs,” he told IoT Hub.

“To reflect that, we will be showcasing the capabilities of AWS Greengrass in delivering IoT edge intelligence with integration to other services such as Amazon Rekognition and AWS Machine Learning solutions.”

AWS Greengrass, Hickin explained, is software to run local compute, messaging, data caching, sync, and machine learning inference capabilities for connected devices in a secure way.

“With AWS Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet,” he said.

“Using AWS Lambda, AWS Greengrass ensures your IoT devices can respond quickly to local events, use Lambda functions running on AWS Greengrass Core to interact with local resources, operate with intermittent connections, stay updated with over the air updates, and minimise the cost of transmitting IoT data to the cloud.”

A new feature, AWS Greengrass ML Inference, brings machine learning services to the edge. “It lets application developers add machine learning models to their devices and edge hardware so that complex machine learned models (prediction, classification etc) can be run and executed on the edge – close to the data,” Hickin said.

To cater for the growing need for processing at the edge of IoT networks, AWS also offers Amazon FreeRTOS. “It’s an operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage,” Hickin said.

“Amazon FreeRTOS is based on the FreeRTOS kernel, a popular open source operating system for microcontrollers, and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power MCU devices to AWS cloud services like AWS IoT Core or to more powerful edge devices running AWS Greengrass.”

Microcontrollers — single chips containing a simple processor — have limited compute power and memory capacity and typically perform simple, functional tasks. “They frequently run operating systems that do not have built in functionality to connect to local networks or the cloud, making IoT applications a challenge. Amazon FreeRTOS offers a solution to this need,” Hickin said

AWS Summit session on IoT

The AWS Sydney Summit will have one session dedicated to IoT: Intelligence of Things: IoT, AWS DeepLens and Amazon SageMaker.

Hickin said both AWS Deeplens and Amazon SageMaker were recently released technologies, announced at its ReInvent 2017 conference.

“This session will highlight how customers can leverage the power of Amazon SageMaker, which is a fully managed end-to-end machine learning tool that enables users to quickly build, train and deploy machine learning models,” Hickin said.

“We’ll demonstrate how to deploy a machine learning L model down to an AWS DeepLens device — a custom built HD video camera designed to run complex machine learning models for video and object recognition — in just a few clicks.

“This represents a key use case where IoT can be used to identify and classify objects and perform actions such as identifying anomalies, counting product or ensuring a safe working environment.”