AWS IoT Greengrass released as a snap

Canonical and AWS are excited to announce the public release of AWS IoT Greengrass as a snap. AWS IoT Greengrass is software that brings local compute, messaging, data caching, sync, and ML inference capabilities to your IoT device. IoT and embedded developers can now easily install and get started with IoT Greengrass in seconds on an ever-expanding list of Linux distributions. By combining IoT Greengrass as a snap and Ubuntu Core, an IoT-focused OS built entirely from snaps, device manufacturers and system integrators can build an IoT appliance in weeks with no compromise on security and long-term support.

Warehouse-vendor Prologis determined that using Rigado Cascade 500 devices running Ubuntu Core 16 to deploy IoT Greengrass was the best choice because of the increased security that Ubuntu Core and snaps bring as well as the control and flexibility provided by Rigado’s Edge Direct service. Using Ubuntu Core on the Rigado Cascade 500, Prologis can gather and process Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) data directly on the device with IoT Greengrass – doing compute on the edge or easily pushing their data up to their AWS cloud.

“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.”

AWS IoT Greengrass as a snap = developer productivity

Snaps are containerised, secure software packages, designed to work perfectly and securely within any Linux environment; not only for IoT devices but also across desktop, cloud and data centers.

Deploying IoT Greengrass as a snap allows developers to quickly iterate on AWS Lambda development by easily installing in one line, the same IoT Greengrass package on their Linux desktop as on their target device.

AWS IoT Greengrass as a snap = security

Snaps are secure with a cryptographically-signed, tamper-proof format, keeping you up to date with automatic over-the-air (OTA) updates, save bandwidth costs using delta-binary downloads, have atomic install and removal for isolated development and production environments, ensure reliability with rollbacks on failed upgrades, and use strict, modern linux-security-module confinement for the strongest security. As the IoT Greengrass snap is officially maintained and published by AWS into the Snap Store, developers, device manufacturers and users can trust that the code they’re running is the original and latest code.

AWS IoT Greengrass as a snap = faster time to market

Using IoT Greengrass as snap and Ubuntu Core, developers can easily create appliance software for any hardware. Device manufacturers can thus accelerate their time from prototype to production. Snaps ensure that these devices always receive the latest security updates applied to their OS platform and to IoT Greengrass, for the entire lifetime of the device.

Getting started with the AWS IoT Greengrass snap

To install the IoT Greengrass snap today, first install snapd 2.38 on your system, if it doesn’t already have it, and run:

snap install aws-iot-greengrass

Or install directly from the Snap Store by clicking here.

After installation, start the greengrassd service by providing your IoT Greengrass certificate and configuration files to the snap with:

snap set aws-iot-greengrass gg-certs=/path/to/the/certs/22e592db.tgz

And with that you’re ready to deploy AWS Lambda functions to the device using standard AWS IoT Greengrass tools. From then on, every time a new stable version of IoT Greengrass is available, the snap will automatically update itself and you’ll be able to work with the latest IoT Greengrass features. If you would rather gate the updates, you can decide to turn off the automatic snap updates.

For more information about snaps, please visit snapcraft.io and the snap documentation. For more information about AWS IoT Greengrass, please visit here.
To find out more about how Rigado and Prologis utilise the AWS IoT Greengrass snap, view this TechTalk.