Q: What is the Device Gateway?

The Device Gateway forms the backbone of communication between connected devices and the cloud capabilities such as the Rules Engine, Device Shadow, and other AWS and 3rd-party services.

The Device Gateway supports the pub/sub messaging pattern, which enables scalable, low-latency, and low-overhead communication. It is particularly useful for IoT scenarios where billions of devices are expected to communicate frequently and with minimal delay. Pub/sub involves clients publishing messages on logical communication channels called ‘topics’ and clients subscribing to topics to receive messages. The device gateway enables the communication between publishers and subscribers. Traditionally, organizations have had to provision, operate, scale, and maintain their own servers as device gateways to take advantage of pub/sub. AWS IoT Core has eliminated this barrier by providing the Device Gateway.

The Device Gateway scales automatically with your usage, without any operational overhead for you. AWS IoT Core supports secure communication with the device gateway, AWS-account level isolation, as well as fine-grained authorization within an AWS account. The device gateway currently supports publish and subscribe over secure MQTT and WebSockets, as well as publish over HTTPS.