AWS IoT Greengrass introduces System Health Telemetry, adds new Stream Manager features, and support for Python 3.8

AWS IoT Greengrass 1.11 is now available. With this release, IoT Greengrass introduces multiple new features including System Health Telemetry, enhancements to Stream Manager, and support for Python 3.8.

The System Health Telemetry feature helps you monitor the status of AWS IoT Greengrass Core devices (CPU usage, memory usage) and the functionality of AWS IoT Greengrass Core system components (Lambda functions, Stream Manager). System health telemetry data is collected locally and automatically published to the AWS Cloud. You can create event rules in Amazon EventBridge to store event information, take corrective action, or initiate other events. For instance, you can use System Health Telemetry to monitor your device fleet and check for devices that have high memory consumption and send relevant notifications to a system operator.

Stream Manager now allows you to update stream configuration dynamically, such as change the size of existing streams to manage amount of data uploaded to the cloud, or pause and resume export of streams. Moreover, Stream Manager now enables you to export data automatically to Amazon S3 and AWS IoT SiteWise (in addition to the already supported targets of AWS IoT Analytics and Amazon Kinesis).

AWS IoT Greengrass also expands its language support enabling you to deploy Lambda functions written using Python 3.8 to Greengrass cores and to install AWS IoT Greengrass to the Yocto Project’s LTS release. You can also use the community supported meta-aws project to install AWS IoT Greengrass to fit-for-purpose, custom Linux distributions built by the Yocto Project build system.

Furthermore, AWS IoT Greengrass 1.11 offers a local HTTP API to help track processes that Greengrass Core initiates on the device. For instance, you can use this API to capture a snapshot of the current state of the Shadow Sync Manager to ensure that local shadows of Greengrass cores and Greengrass aware devices are in sync with the AWS Cloud.

With this release, you can configure the port number used for internal communication between Greengrass Core system components. You can also configure the timeout setting for this port. For instance, if your Greengrass Core is running on resource constrained devices or in slow network environments, you can increase the timeout period to allow for Greengrass internal communication to complete during processing spikes or device startups. In addition, the limit on number of Greengrass aware devices per Greengrass group has increased from 200 to 2500, and the limit on number of subscriptions per Greengrass group has increased from 1000 to 10000, enabling you to connect more devices to a Greengrass Core.

AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass is also updated to support AWS IoT Greengrass 1.11. You can use the latest version of AWS IoT Device Tester to qualify your AWS IoT Greengrass devices in the AWS Partner Device Catalog. You can also use the latest version of AWS IoT Device Tester to validate if your devices can use AWS IoT Greengrass and interoperate with other AWS IoT services.