Lets device manufacturers build IoT appliances in weeks

Apr 3, 2019 14:29 GMT  ·  By

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, announced the availability of the Amazon IoT Greengrass software as a Snap universal app.

Developed by Amazon for IoT device manufactures and system integrators, the AWS IoT Greengrass software seamlessly extends the Amazon Web Services (AWS) to edge devices, allowing them to use the cloud for management while acting locally on the data they generate. AWS IoT Greengrass brings together data caching, local compute, messaging, sync, and ML inference capabilities to IoT devices.

In an attempt to increase application security and developer productivity across Linux-based operating systems, Canonical and Amazon joined forces to make AWS IoT Greengrass available as in the Snap universal binary format, which will enable device manufactures and system integrators build IoT appliances in weeks without compromising on security, nor long-term support.

"Rigado Cascade Gateways provide flexible connectivity and secure edge computing for large-scale commercial IoT applications," says Toban Zolman, Rigado’s Vice President of Product. "The combination of Ubuntu Core with AWS IoT Greengrass gives Rigado customers a containerised platform to quickly deploy IoT applications that leverage the power and scale of AWS Lambda functions."

How to get AWS IoT Greengrass as a Snap

Installing the AWS IoT Greengrass software as a Snap is as easy as pointing your web browser to the Snap Store. However, you should make sure first that you’re running the Snapd 2.38 Snappy daemon on your Linux system before attempting to install AWS IoT Greengrass either directly from the Snap Store or by running the “snap install aws-iot-greengrass" command in a terminal emulator.

Once the installation has completed, you will have to start the greengrassd daemon service by adding your AWS IoT Greengrass certificate and configuration files to the Snap with the “snap set aws-iot-greengrass gg-certs=/path/to/the/certs/22e592db.tgz” command. That’s it, you’re now ready to deploy AWS Lambda functions to your IoT device using the AWS IoT Greengrass tools.

Developed by Canonical for the Ubuntu Core operating system, a slimdown version of Ubuntu designed specifically for deployments on IoT (Internet of Things) and embedded devices, the Snap file format provides containerized software packages that are easy to install not only on Ubuntu but on numerous other GNU/Linux distributions, including Arch Linux, Fedora, SUSE, and others.