AWS IoT Device Management vs AWS IoT Greengrass comparison

As many IoT deployments consist of hundreds of thousands to millions of devices, it is essential to track, monitor, and manage connected device fleets. You need to ensure your IoT devices work properly and securely after they have been deployed. You also need to secure access to your devices, monitor health, detect and remotely troubleshoot problems, and manage software and firmware updates.

AWS IoT Device Management makes it easy to securely register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale. With AWS IoT Device Management, you can register your connected devices individually or in bulk, and easily manage permissions so that devices remain secure. You can also organize your devices, monitor and troubleshoot device functionality, query the state of any IoT device in your fleet, and send firmware updates over-the-air (OTA). AWS IoT Device Management is agnostic to device type and OS, so you can manage devices from constrained microcontrollers to connected cars all with the same service. AWS IoT Device Management allows you to scale your fleets and reduce the cost and effort of managing large and diverse IoT device deployments.

AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage. With AWS IoT Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, Docker containers, or both, execute predictions based on machine learning models, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet.

With AWS IoT Greengrass, you can use familiar languages and programming models to create and test your device software in the cloud, and then deploy it to your devices. AWS IoT Greengrass can be programmed to filter device data, manage the life cyle of that data on the device, and only transmit necessary information back to AWS. You can also connect to third-party applications, on-premises software, and AWS services out-of-the-box with AWS IoT Greengrass Connectors. Connectors also jumpstart device onboarding with pre-built protocol adapter integrations and allow you to streamline authentication via integration with AWS Secrets Manager.