The Internet of Things is a concept behind gathering and delivering information from a device and the physical world via device sensors to the internet or application consuming the data. The value of IoT is being able to understand the captured data at near real time intervals which ultimately allows the consuming system and applications the ability to respond rapidly to that data. Take for example, a device that transmits its GPS coordinates. Your IoT application could respond by suggesting points of interest relative to the proximity of those coordinates. Furthermore, if you had stored preferences related to the user of the device, you could fine tune those recommendations tailored to that individual. In this particular example, the speed at which the application can respond to the coordinates is critical to achieving a great user experience. Caching can play an important role here, for example, the points of interest along with the geo coordinates could be stored in a key/value store such as Redis to enable fast retrieval. From an application development perspective, you can essentially code your IoT application to respond to any event given there is a programmatic means to do so. Important considerations to be made when building an IoT architecture include the response time involved with analyzing the ingested data, architecting a solution that can scale N number of devices and delivering an architecture that is cost-effective.

AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.