In the world of IoT device management, going Serverless takes care of most of the hassle of doing it yourself. How would you feel if your application could tell your tracking device to update when it would be the cheapest to do so? How about telling your device to send data less frequently when it is connected to a network with expensive data rates? I will show you how to do exactly that. In this post, I will explain how to manage your devices using the EMnify Data Streamer, AWS Kinesis and AWS Lambda.
In March 2021, we had one of our regular EMnify Squad Summits and this time around, the format was that of an internal hackathon. All our squads hacked together for 2 days to come up with interesting solutions for our customers that they can use with existing EMnify services. One such solution was to automate the device firmware update process.
Use Case
Consider this scenario: you have a fleet of devices which are traveling around the world, sending data to you, and you need to roll out a firmware upgrade. Now firmware upgrades use up substantial amounts of data, so ideally you will want to do this without going over your data limit and while connected to a network where the data rates are cheaper. Normally, you would have to constantly monitor each device for when it enters a cheaper rate zone. Or, update the device manually when the vehicle comes back to the base. Both of these options are inefficient and waste a lot of time.