Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Design patterns for distributed client-server systems via IoT (PRT327)

Summary

• Eric Schultz, VP of Product Management at Trend Micro, shared their journey of adopting IoT to replace traditional client-server networking.
• Trend Micro, a cybersecurity company with a global presence, aimed to modernize scalable cloud networking for client-server communications.
• They faced challenges with agent provisioning, authentication, bidirectional data transfer, and scalability.
• The goal was to support 100 million agents without managing fleets of EC2 instances and load balancers.
• Trend Micro introduced IoT Core to handle event data, which allowed them to limit the creation of new EC2 pools and enabled multiple data transfer patterns.
• They are transitioning towards a SaaS hybrid model, where everything goes through IoT, retiring EC2 instances, and using the IoT Rules Engine for routing.
• There are still challenges with agent reactivation/cloning, offline message queuing, and large file transfers.
• IoT was chosen for its scalability, security, and ability to enable internal teams to run faster.
• Shamik Mishra, Consumer IoT GM from AWS, provided an overview of AWS IoT services and how they cater to diverse IoT needs.
• IoT Core is a managed service that handles device gateway, message broker, and rules engine, which are essential for IoT devices and were leveraged by Trend Micro.
• IoT Core supports MQTT, HTTP, and WebSockets, and integrates with over 20 AWS services.
• IoT Core's features are beneficial for virtual things like Trend Micro's agents, as they share similar patterns with physical IoT devices.
• Best practices for IoT solutions include decoupling clients and applications, focusing on reliability, elasticity, scalability, and security, and ensuring proper error handling and retry policies.
• AWS offers Device Advisor and Device Defender Audit to help customers test and secure their IoT configurations.

Insights

• Trend Micro's approach to using IoT Core for agent communication is innovative, as it applies IoT design patterns to cybersecurity, which is traditionally not considered an IoT application.
• The transition to IoT Core allowed Trend Micro to offload undifferentiated heavy lifting to AWS, focusing on their core value proposition and enabling faster feature development.
• The use of IoT Core's Rules Engine for routing data is a key factor in Trend Micro's ability to scale and manage different data transfer patterns efficiently.
• The challenges faced by Trend Micro, such as agent reactivation/cloning and large file transfers, highlight the need for IoT solutions to be adaptable to unique use cases beyond typical IoT devices.
• AWS IoT services, particularly IoT Core, are designed to handle a wide range of IoT applications, demonstrating the flexibility and scalability of AWS's IoT offerings.
• The session underscores the importance of serverless and event-driven architectures in modern application design, especially when dealing with large-scale distributed systems.
• The insights provided by Shamik Mishra on AWS IoT services and best practices offer valuable guidance for organizations looking to innovate and optimize their systems using IoT technologies.