In this talk, delivered at the 2018 AWS New York Summit, Forrest shares real-world learning experiences building on AWS's edge IoT service, Greengrass.

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Forrest Brazeal
Sr. Cloud Architect, Trek10
DEV12
Living On The Edge with AWS
Greengrass

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Forrest Brazeal
• AWS Serverless Hero
• Cloud Architect at Trek10
• Cartoons, etc at
A Cloud Guru

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AWS Greengrass
- Announced at re:Invent 2016, GA in summer 2017
- Extension of AWS IoT
- Lets you run Lambda functions on edge devices

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Hold up. Why would I want to do
that?

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History time!
• AWS released their IoT service at re:Invent 2015.
• It lets you hook IoT devices into a cloud gateway and pass
messages via MQTT, HTTP, WebSockets, etc.
• IMPORTANT: message broker, rules, orchestration, etc all
live in the cloud gateway ("IoT Core").
• Cool, but …

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What if we moved our device gateway to the edge?
• Lower latency
• Works with intermittent/poor internet connectivity
• Potential compliance wins

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The Case For Greengrass
• “Laws of the land, of physics, of economics”
• You can manage your edge code the same way you
manage your cloud code (great if you have a serverless
architecture)
• Tightly-integrated security model
(Fun side note: if you ever wanted to poke around in a
Lambda container, now you can!)

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Let’s follow a humble Lambda
function on its epic journey to the
edge …

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Greengrass Groups
• Fundamental abstraction
• Location: CLOUD
• Defines the state of your connected devices
• Provides service discovery

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Greengrass Core Device
• A computer running the Greengrass service
• Location: EDGE
• The ”brains” of your operation at the edge
• ONE per group (for now)
• Can run long-lived Lambda functions!
• Example: a Raspberry Pi running Greengrass software

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Greengrass Resources
• Sensors, filesystems, or anything mounted to your Core
device
• Location: EDGE
• You have to give your Lambda functions specific
permissions to access these
• Example: a camera plugged into a Raspberry Pi

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Greengrass Devices
• Basically, another word for IoT Things
• Location: EDGE
• CANNOT run Lambda functions
• Talk to each other, the Greengrass Core, and AWS via
subscriptions
• Example: an IoT thermometer sending telemetry data to the
Core device

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Lessons learned
• A lot of Greengrass is an abstraction on existing AWS IoT
primitives.
• When you click “Use easy creation” in the Greengrass
Group console, this happens…

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Easy Group Creation
1. Greengrass Group created
2. IoT keys and certificate created
3. IoT Thing created (for Greengrass Core)
4. Certificate principal attached to Core thing
5. IoT policy created for Core thing with Greengrass, IoT
permissions
6. Cert attached to IoT policy
7. Core thing defined in Greengrass group

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Sadly, Greengrass does not have
CloudFormation support.
(Yet!)

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Any time we update our Lambda code, we have to…
• Update the Lambda function
• Publish a new version of the Lambda function
• Associate that version with the Lambda alias used by our
existing Greengrass group
• Create a new deployment of our Greengrass group
That sounds like something we should automate.

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SAM to the rescue
DeviceCoreFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
Properties:
CodeUri: device/
Handler: device. handler
AutoPublishAlias: !Ref FunctionAlias

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SAM to the rescue
DeviceCoreFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
Properties:
CodeUri: device/
Handler: device. handler
AutoPublishAlias: !Ref FunctionAlias

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SAM to the rescue
• Now we can use a CloudFormation custom resource to
deploy the Greengrass group
• Full code on the Trek10 blog:
https://www.trek10.com/blog/sam-greengrass-lambda-
update

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More cool stuff
• Device shadows
• ML inference at the edge

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Real world use case
• Quick service restaurant
• Real time food quality analysis
• Is this sandwich too toasty?
• How many pieces of chicken in this bucket?
• Does this pizza have the right toppings?

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Reach out…
Email: fbrazeal@trek10.com
Twitter: @forrestbrazeal
Forrest Brazeal

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Q & A