Ian Massingham, Technical Evangelist with Amazon Web Services joined us at Thingmonk to talk about building better IoT applications without servers. He began by reminding us of some common challenges of developing IoT structures. Deployment, scale, security, lifecycle management; all the usual suspects. Suggesting that to build a platform and everything that entails is less than optimal unless you are actually ‘building a platform, in which case fine’ otherwise consider building on an existing platform. Not the first of the bigger players to tell us about the benefits of opting into established services and to emphasise how their platform has good integration with a range of coding languages and APIs. What Ian called building ‘Hello World’ for IoT developers.
Going on to discuss the advantages of serverless event driven platforms like AWS lambda which represents a new architectural model where developers write software that defines the patterns for their infrastructure which can help to solve a lot of the issues discussed. Not so much by removing the need to engage with these challenges but by embedding the process in the software to create very small runtime environments without having to think about those difficulties. Giving an example of how these techniques can be applied to IoT Ian showed us the Amazon IoT button and a few test use cases.
Ian rounded off his presentation by lighting up the obligatory LED using his IoT button and a Raspberry Pi in a live on-line demonstration of integration between the AWS Lambda and Twitter as a 3rd party API
https://www.hackster.io/youngd/ping-pong-showdown-eabaed
http://www.andrewmcgill.me/2016/08/19/make-every-week-sweetgreen-salad-button.html
