AWS IoT services

The AWS IoT family splits into three jobs: connecting devices and routing their messages, managing and securing a fleet once it is deployed, and running software or collecting measurements at the edge. The family has shrunk: four services that used to sit in it have been withdrawn and a fifth is closed to new customers. Those are listed at the end, because designs and older documentation still refer to them as though they were available.

Connecting devices

AWS IoT Core is the entry point and the service almost every design starts from. Devices connect to its message broker over MQTT, MQTT over WebSockets or HTTPS and publish to topics; AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN connects low-power wide-area devices without a separate network server. Each device has an identity backed by an X.509 certificate and an IoT policy, and a device shadow holds its last reported and desired state so that an application can read or set state while the device is offline.

The rules engine is what makes it more than a broker. A rule selects messages with a SQL-like statement and delivers them to other services — S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, Firehose, SNS and SQS among them — which is how device traffic reaches storage, analytics and application code without a server in between.

Managing a fleet

AWS IoT Device Management is the registry and fleet tooling: bulk registration of devices, organisation into groups and hierarchies, search across the fleet, remote actions through jobs, and over-the-air firmware updates.

AWS IoT Device Defender audits the fleet’s configuration against security best practice — over-permissive policies, shared or expiring certificates, disabled logging — and monitors device behaviour for anomalies, raising alerts when a device’s traffic or connection pattern departs from its profile.

Running at the edge

AWS IoT Greengrass is the runtime installed on the device itself. It deploys and manages components — your own code, Lambda functions, containers, machine learning models — so that inference and local logic keep working without connectivity, and synchronises with AWS IoT Core when the link returns. Version 2 is the current one and the only one to build on: AWS ends support for Greengrass V1 on 7 October 2026, after which the V1 console and V1 resources are no longer reachable, so any fleet still on V1 needs its migration planned now.

FreeRTOS covers the other end of the hardware range, providing a real-time operating system for microcontrollers too small for Greengrass, and AWS IoT ExpressLink puts a pre-qualified connectivity module in front of an existing design.

AWS IoT SiteWise collects, models and monitors industrial equipment data. SiteWise Edge software runs in the plant, gathers measurements from local equipment over industrial protocols, computes metrics on site and forwards what is needed to AWS. Alongside it, AWS IoT TwinMaker builds digital twins from those data sources, modelling equipment as a knowledge graph and rendering it through a Grafana plug-in.

Services AWS has withdrawn

Four services that appeared in this family have been discontinued. Their documentation has been removed and they no longer appear in the AWS IoT service list, so a design or tutorial that depends on any of them needs rework:

• AWS IoT Events detected patterns across device telemetry and triggered alarms from conditional logic. Equivalent detection is usually rebuilt as an IoT Core rule feeding Lambda, Step Functions or a stream processor, with CloudWatch alarms for thresholds.
• AWS IoT Analytics aggregated, enriched and stored time-series device data for SQL and machine learning analysis. The usual replacement is an IoT Core rule delivering messages to S3, queried with Athena and visualised in QuickSight. Note that Amazon Timestream for LiveAnalytics, which would once have been the obvious destination for device telemetry, is itself closed to new customers — AWS points new work at Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB.
• AWS IoT 1-Click let simple pre-provisioned buttons and devices invoke a Lambda function directly. Devices now register with IoT Core like any other and trigger Lambda through a rule.
• AWS IoT Things Graph offered a drag-and-drop way to compose device and web-service workflows. Step Functions covers the orchestration, with IoT Core rules as the trigger.

Closed to new customers

One service is still running but can no longer be adopted, which is a different state from withdrawal and easy to miss when reading older material.

AWS IoT FleetWise collects, normalises and transfers vehicle data, decoding signals from in-vehicle networks so that fleet telemetry arrives in a usable form. It is no longer open to new customers, and AWS has said it will add no further features while continuing security updates for existing accounts. AWS directs new connected-vehicle work to its Guidance for Connected Mobility on AWS, which assembles equivalent capability from IoT Core, Greengrass and the analytics services rather than from a single managed service.