AWS Every Day - Digital Twin

AWS Digital Twin is the ultimate in big picture services from cloud service provides. It brings together many of the AWS IoT products.

I want to use the spiderman meme with two identical spidermen pointing at each other. But copyrights and all. AWS Digital Twin Stitches together other AWS IoT and data analysis products at a much higher abstraction layer. If you watched Werner Vogels’ re:Invent Keynote, Dr. Vogels painted a fantastic picture of what’s essentially AWS Digital Twin.

AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Sitewise, and AWS IoT Greengrass (we’ll cover tomorrow) are essential components of Digital Twin. IoT Core is the primary tool to get your IoT data into AWS. IoT Sitewise is the tool to cater to industrial IoT by providing more powerful device management and ETL within AWS. Greengrass is a tool to provide endpoint control and management. What happens when you combine this capability with a more robust data streaming service and ETL tooling?

You get AWS Digital Twin. The ability to create a logical representation of an entire factory (or retail space) within AWS. The types of simulations Vogels talked about in his keynote come within reach of organizations looking to model operations in 3D. Think of taking streaming data (IoT Sitewise/IoT Core/IoT Greengrass) from air conditioners, molding machines, and forklifts and mixing it with data from SAP, HR PTO data. You can then do what-if scenarios on the scale of Vogels’ keynotes. What’s the catch? Lock-in is one. However, what platform gives you such a headstart while providing the infrastructure?

All of this started with the lowly AWS IoT Core.