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Comment by jaytaph | Hacker News Reader

The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly because I have no experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it took a few days to actually figure out how to create and connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT devices (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be vendor-locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon somebody with more experience in the IOT field could provide more insight in these things.

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I'll give it a go:

IoT Core: Managed MQTT broker, and state management for devices with intermittent connectivity

FreeRTOS: RTOS operating system for microcontrollers to automatically connect to IOT-Core or greengrass.

IoT 1-Click: Manage 1-click buttons that can be connected to other systems like Lambda

IoT Analytics: Clean up and save messages from topics into a data-store for analytics

IoT Device Defender: Automated detection of misbehaving devices

IoT Device Management: Firmware release management

IoT Events: Visually build automation rules based on device data

IoT Greengrass: Run Lambda functions on remote devices, and manage release of new versions.

IoT SiteWise: Turnkey industrial automation platform

IoT Things Graph: Represent IoT devices in terms of connectivity - for example a door sensors connects to a hub, which has an internet connection.

And one bonus definition:

AWS Sumerian - A 3D game engine integrated with AWS services.

This is a great list. I'd add a few things:

IoT Greengrass - Edge computing that can run Lambda functions and ML models on prem.

IoT Core - Managed MQTT broker, state management and rules engine for devices with intermittent connectivity

I'm not sure I'd call SiteWise a "automation platform" I think it's more of a data collection and visualization platform?

The IoT world is full of vendor locked solutions and platforms that you must avoid. And the joke "the S in IoT stands for Security" is very very true, though AWS Greengrass is actually pretty good for security, if you don't mind sending all your data to a USA company of course.

I would recommend to go opensource and skip the platforms that try to lock you in. There is a lot of solutions depending on how low-level you want to be. Like HomeAssistant if you want high level, or a Mosquitto MQTT broker and NodeRed and some dongles on a Raspberry pi if you want to be lower level.

Disclaimer: I'm VP of Engineering for software consultancy focused on IoT. We work with startups, midcap and several fortune 500s.

I agree vendor lock in must be avoided. I also disagree that Open Source is the best approach in all situations. Mosquito and Raspberry Pi are fine for smaller projects, but if you're going to push 100M or a billion messages, you're better off leveraging a IaaS solution like AWS IoT Core. At least, until you have a dedicated 24/7 opps team that can triage and support the solution.

The trick is to create the right abstractions and architectures to migrate your solutions off of AWS and onto another solution: Azure, your own, etc.

Do your sensors/lamps use Zigbee? I use the excellent Zigbee2MQTT library and a DIY Zigbee sniffer. Now I can use most vendor-locked IOT-devices (Hue, Ikea Tradfri, cheapo Chinese stuff) in my Home Assistant without the need of a separate bridge.

Check if your devices are supported here: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.htm...

The devices have a ESP8266, and they should be easily flashed with custom firmware to connect to MQTT. But I found that OTA flashing did not work, and the only viable option is to solder apparently. I'm dangerous enough without a soldering iron in my vicinity.

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