Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a flexible, fully managed pub/sub messaging and mobile notifications service for coordinating the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients. For IoT, SNS becomes crucial for sending notifications or messages triggered by IoT devices or sensors. It enables IoT applications to push real-time alerts based on sensor data to end users or other systems, ensuring timely response to events or conditions monitored by IoT devices. This service supports a variety of communication channels, such as SMS, email, or AWS Lambda functions, making it a versatile tool for integrating IoT device activity with broader communication strategies.
Other notable AWS services for IoT
There are a number of other AWS services that are notable that we will not cover in this book, though we strongly encourage you to have a look at them to learn more about what they provide, as they are also powerful tools for managing your IoT deployments. These tools include AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT Button, AWS IoT Device Defender, AWS IoT Device Management, AWS IoT Events, AWS IoT Things Graph, and AWS Partner Device Catalog. These all are services that are also part of the IoT catalog offerings from AWS. We will also look at the IoT Analytics offerings in the next chapter.
With knowledge of basic AWS services, we can move on to a practical exercise to see some of these services in action.
A practical exercise utilizing the services
In this practical exercise, we will look at creating a thing and connecting it to AWS IoT Core to simulate pub/sub communication. In this case, we will let the thing be an EC2 instance so that you also have experience in deploying EC2 instances as well, which is a core service within AWS.
Deploying and connecting to your first EC2 instance
To start off the practical, we will deploy and connect to our EC2 instance:
In your EC2 console, search for EC2 to open the EC2 console or reach it at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
Choose Launch instances on the console dashboard.
Figure 7.2 – The Launch instances button on the EC2 console
In step 1, you will see a list of different basic configurations, which are called Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). These act as templates to be used for your instance. Set the HVM version to Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type. We are picking the free tier-eligible AMI type, as we want to keep ourselves free from costs for this exercise.
Figure 7.3 – Selecting an HVM version for EC2
Configure the hardware for your instance on the Choose an Instance Type page and select the t2.micro type, which is by default selected.
Click on Review and Launch and let the setup wizard complete the other configuration settings.
Within the Review Instance Launch page, click on Launch.
You will then be prompted for a key pair. A key pair allows you to connect to your instance and is provided only at the time you ask to create one, so be sure that you download it. Select Create a new key pair, enter an appropriate name for the key pair, and choose Download Key Pair. Make sure that you save your private key file in a safe place.
Click on Launch instances when you are ready to do so.
A confirmation page will then let you know your instance is launching. Click on View instances to see the instance that you have just launched. You can see the current status of the instance, which will be in Pending due to having been just launched. After the instance has been launched, it will have its status changed to Running. You can see in the information below that it receives its own public DNS name.
You can then connect to your EC2 instance. To make things easy for this exercise, we will connect to it through our browser. Select the instance and choose Connect.
Choose Amazon EC2 Instance Connect and click Connect. You should now have the EC2 Instance Connect window with your EC2 environment currently showing.
With this, we have created a new EC2 instance and will have been able to connect to it. Now, we will configure our AWS CLI so that we can perform operations to the cloud from our EC2 environment.
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