Without much knowledge on serverless implementations, Spireon came to Onica, a Premier AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner who holds multiple AWS Competencies, including IoT, DevOps, and Data & Analytics. Spireon worked with Onica to create a serverless IoT platform on AWS. The whole implementation of the new platform took 4 months, drastically reducing their development time by more than half, moving them from microservices to serverless.
Smart Trailer 2.0
Previously, Spireon’s Smart Trailer sensors were reliant on ultrasonic technology, but with the new IntelliScan Cargo Sensor, a gateway device with laser infrared light sensor and optical sensors, they needed a platform with faster data processing and real-time alerting. Previously connected through Amazon EC2, the sensor connection has moved to AWS Lambda with images stored in Amazon DynamoDB. Spireon also uses Amazon SageMaker to classify images from all the vehicles installed to train up a model that improves over time and accurately detects what is in a trailer, among other use cases.
Simplified Device Management & Security on AWS
Onica worked with Spireon on developing the new serverless IoT platform. The new platform supported provisioning and management of millions of devices where unique device certificates are provisioned and loaded onto the device through AWS IoT Device Management and Device Gateway. Event ingestions flow through AWS IoT Core through Message Broker and Rules Engine which routes to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. These events are then processed by AWS Lambda for enrichment and persistence.
The platform also allowed for the remote configuration and control of devices. “We travel across borders and so in the event that those carrier networks are offline, AWS IoT provides something called the shadow state which is really nice because if we are sending tasks to devices and the device is offline, the shadow state will maintain those commands in a queue for those devices and when they come back online, they can execute those commands,” Gruenhagen said. The device shadow provides a reliable mechanism to manage device configuration and state information, while the message broker allows ad-hoc commands to be sent to the device.
The platform provides sophisticated over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates through AWS IoT Core Jobs Services with the delivery of firmware update instructions and binaries to all devices. Use of AWS IoT Things Graphs allows for targeting devices by device type, customer, firmware versions, and other parameters.
Now, Spireon has tens of thousands of trailers installed and hundreds of thousands of images and counting. “Many thanks to Onica for their assistance. They’ve helped my team become experts in building a serverless architecture, and also be better at what we do in the IoT space through our integration with AWS’ IoT platform and the incorporation of AI into our products,” says Gruenhagen. “We’re now able to provide real time visibility to our customers and deeper insights.”
