The Context
A recent survey commissioned by Intel Corporation reveals that the world is headed for a smart home explosion. It is poised to be as commonplace as smartphones by 2025. And the AWS IoT platform has had a large role to play in this phenomenon. A new player in the home luxury space had a vision to disrupt the smart home niche and ride the oncoming market wave through its IoT enabled fragrance device. The device was designed to disperse fragrances chosen by the user, in varying concentrations. Different fragrances could be mixed and diffused according to the time of day or when triggered by the user. Without prior expertise in setting up a scalable IoT architecture, the client sought out Tismo to don the role of technology consultant and service provider.
The Challenge
Tismo’s team of IoT engineers understood that the speed of execution was crucial to the project, as competing products would erode the market advantage that the client held. It was up to Tismo to build a robust and highly scalable IoT architecture that would not pose any device or server management challenges. Tismo would have to future-proof the infrastructure supporting the smart home ecosystem, make connectivity simple, and harness data insights from multiple devices to deliver value to the client and in turn to the end users.
The Solution – An Architecture on AWS IoT
Having close to a decade of experience in working with IoT projects, Tismo realized that building an architecture on AWS IoT would be the ideal route to go as it provides a well-rounded and secure solution to the client’s needs. The Tismo team is adept at using AWS IoT Platform and Services to connect and manage devices and utilizing AWS’ cloud-based services to maintain device health, keep them secure, send commands and configuration, capture device data and use the same for further analysis.
AWS IoT Architecture for Smart Home Fragrance System
Tismo’s AWS IoT based architecture enabled a highly secure, robust and scalable way to connect thousands of sophisticated devices. Additionally, it can easily handle massive amounts of real-time data and scale automatically as end devices and customers are added in the future. This would allow the client to focus on creating smarter solutions rather than managing the IT infrastructure. Tismo made use of Amazon DynamoDB to ensure reliable performance and used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to implement the business logic. The AWS IoT architecture also utilized AWS Lambda functions to enable optimal resource management. For analytics, Tismo made use of AWS Pinpoint and QuickSight service.
The AWS services used in this architecture
The potential pitfall in the form of device failure was prudently countered by implementing Amazon CloudWatch on the AWS IoT architecture. It provides actionable insights to monitor applications, understand system performance and get a unified view of operational health. Amazon Cognito was used to provide the necessary layer of security to the mobile and web dashboards. The AWS IoT architecture designed by Tismo accounted for security and control and allowed the configuration of individual devices and easy implementation of all the standard web security measures.
Summary
The Tismo team set up an AWS IoT based architecture that paved a highly secure, robust and scalable way to connect thousands of sophisticated fragrance dispensers. The architecture can handle massive amounts of real-time data and scale automatically as end devices and customers are added in the future.