Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week extended its reach into IoT and edge computing with a heavy emphasis on industrial applications, including digital twins, equipment sensors, and vehicles.

“I actually call this the internet of billions of things,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said during his keynote at AWS re:Invent. Multiple AWS services target this seemingly endless market, including FreeRTOS, IoT Core, Greengrass.

The cloud giant continues to add features to existing services and also announced AWS IoT TwinMaker, which allows developers to create digital twins of physical buildings and assets; and AWS IoT FleetWise, a service that allows automakers to collect, organize, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real-time.

“There's also many devices definitely in manufacturing environments that are not connected. They're old. The typical age of manufacturing equipment in the U.S. is 27 years. That means that these devices were not modern data generators at all,” Vogels said. 

A proliferation of wireless sensors that can be added to previously disconnected equipment presents AWS with a big opportunity in industrial IoT, according to Mike MacKenzie, GM of AWS industrial IoT and edge. “We've just seen this huge proliferation in the amount of data that industrial companies are collecting,” he said in a phone interview.

“We see everything as an and strategy, not an or strategy,” MacKenzie added. “We want to make sure that customers who want to do things directly, because they've got talented developers on site, can use our tools to quickly and easily deploy sensors, connect to those sensors, stream data so they can get analytic insights, and even pull those into digital twins so they can close the loop.”

AWS works with multiple partners, systems integrators, and specialized IT vendors to help customers achieve their goals, while underlining the hyperscale compute back end that AWS provides, he explained. 

Industrial companies can stick an inexpensive sensor to old equipment, set up a gateway and feed that data to the cloud, according to MacKenzie. “It just makes the deployment model so much easier and so much more streamlined, that you don't have to look at these giant retrofits in order to instrument equipment, and I think that’s been a really big trend.”

Digital twins, which create situational awareness advantages for operators, represent another growing area of interest, he said, pointing to AWS IoT TwinMaker, a service now available in preview mode.

Edge computing, which comes in various forms, also presents interesting use cases for industrial IoT because it allows enterprises to move workloads to cloud-augmented edge models and inference engines to process and apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to operations, MacKenzie explained. 

“Edge is a really important part of IoT, because sometimes decisions need to be made as close to the process as possible. But those decisions can be augmented by big data and deep learning models that you can only get by connecting up multiple sites, processing that data through those data models, and then passing the results back to those local decision making processes,” he said. 

“So to me, the edge and IoT are, they're good bedfellows, they go together like peanut butter and jam. We also can't really talk about IoT without talking about AI and machine learning,” MacKenzie added. “The nexus of the three of those is really creating a lot of power for our customers to make better decisions, and really use the experience of years of cloud development and years of on-premise development coming together to really decide where that workload should live.”

AWS Regions, Local Zones, Outposts, and Wavelength all intersect with the cloud provider’s IoT and edge strategy, depending on how businesses want to shape their workloads, and where access or decisions have to be made, he added. 

“There’s multiple types of edge” and “customers need these for various reasons,” MacKenzie said. 

AWS Local Zones, which are built on Outpost racks, currently span 16 locations around the U.S. to bring services and lower latencies closer to customers.

“We will be expanding the local zones internationally across the world,” Vogels said, adding that more than 30 new AWS Local Zones will be activated in major cities across at least 21 countries starting next year.