AWS IoT Core adds capabilities to enrich MQTT messages and simplify permission management

AWS IoT Core, a managed cloud service that lets you securely connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the cloud and manage them at scale, announces two new capabilities - ability to enrich MQTT messages with additional data and use thing-to-connection association for simplifying permission management. Message enrichment capability enables developers to augment MQTT messages from devices with additional information from thing registry, without modifying their devices. The thing-to-connection association enables mapping an MQTT client to a registry thing, for client IDs that don’t match thing name. This will enable developers to leverage registry information in IoT policies, easily associate device actions to lifecycle events, and utilize existing capabilities like custom cost allocation and resource-specific logging, previously only available for matching client IDs and thing names.

To enrich all messages from devices, developers can define a subset of registry attributes as propagating attributes. They can customize their message routing, processing workflows using this appended data. For example, in automotive applications, developers can selectively route messages to the desired backend depending on the appended metadata, such as vehicle make and type stored in thing registry. Additionally, with thing-to-connection association, developers can leverage existing features like using registry metadata in IoT policies, associate AWS IoT Core lifecycle events to a thing, do custom cost allocation through billing groups, and enable resource-specific logging, even if MQTT client ID and thing name differ.

These new features are available in all AWS regions where AWS IoT Core is present. For more information refer to the developer guide and API documentation.