What is a remote operation? - Amazon IoT Core
Benefits of using Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs for remote operations
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What is a remote operation?

A remote operation is any update or action you can perform on a physical device, virtual device, or endpoint that can be done remotely without the need for the physical presence of an operator or technician. The remote operation is performed using an over-the-air (OTA) update so your devices don't have to be physically present. Managing your device fleet in the Amazon Web Services Cloud allows you to perform remote operations on your devices when they are registered with Amazon IoT Core.

Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs offers a scalable approach for performing remote actions on your devices registered with Amazon IoT Core. A job is created in the Amazon Web Services Cloud and pushed out to all targeted devices using an OTA update via the MQTT or HTTP protocol.

Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs provide you the capability to perform remote operations such as factory resets, device reboots, and software OTA updates in a secure, scalable, and more cost-effective way.

For more information on Amazon IoT Core, see What is Amazon IoT?.

For more information on Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs, see What is Amazon IoT Jobs?.

Benefits of using Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs for remote operations

Using Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs to perform your remote operations streamlines the management of your device fleet. The following list highlights some of the key benefits for using Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs to perform your remote operations:

  • Seamless integration with other Amazon Web Services services

    • Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs integrates closely with the following value-added Amazon Web Services services and features:

      • Amazon S3: Store your remote operation instructions in a secure Amazon S3 bucket where you control the access permissions for that content. Using an Amazon S3 bucket provides a scalable and durable storage solution that natively intergrates with Amazon IoT Device Management Software Package Catalog allowing Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs to reference and substitute in update instructions. For more information, see What is Amazon S3?.

      • Amazon CloudWatch: Monitor and log the remote operation implementation status of the job execution for each device in addition to other device activity to track and analyze the overall job performance in Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs. For more information, see What is Amazon CloudWatch? Monitoring jobs logs and capturing historical data for troubleshooting. How it works with jobs.

      • Amazon IoT Device Shadow service: Maintain a digital representation of your Amazon IoT thing via a device shadow using Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs so your device's state is available to applications and other services regardless of device connectivity. For more information, see Amazon IoT Device Shadow service.

      • Fleet Hub for Amazon IoT Device Management: Build standalone web applications for monitoring the health of your device fleet. For more information, see What is Fleet Hub for Amazon IoT Device Management?.

  • Security best practices

    • Permission control: Control the access permissions to your remote operating instructions using Amazon S3 and determine which IAM users can deploy your remote operating instructions to your device fleet using Amazon IoT policies and IAM user roles.

  • Scalability

    • Targeted job deployment: Control which devices receive the job document from a job with a targeted job deployment using specific device grouping criteria entered in your job document when creating the job. Creating an Amazon IoT thing for each device and storing that information in the Amazon IoT registry allows you to perform targeted searches using fleet indexing. You can create custom groups based on the fleet indexing search results to support your target job deployment. For more information, see Managing devices with Amazon IoT. Use jobs to do snapshot vs continuous jobs.

    • Job status: Track the status of the job document rollout to your device fleet and overall job status from a device fleet level in addition to the individual implementation status of the job document on each device. For more information, see Jobs and job execution states.

    • New device scalability: Easily deploy your job document to a new device by adding it to an existing, custom group created using fleet indexing via a continuous job. This will save you time over having to deploy the job document to each new device separately. Or, you can use a more targeted approach with a snapshot shot by deploying a job document to a predetermined group of devices once and then the job is completed.

  • Flexibility

    • Job configurations: Customize your job and job document with the optional job configurations rollout, scheduling, abort, timeout, and retry to meet your specific needs. For more information, see Job configurations.

  • Cost effective

    • Introduce a more efficient cost structure for maintaining your device fleet by leveraging Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs to deploy critical updates and perform routine maintenance tasks. A do-it-yourself (DIY) solution to maintain your device fleet includes recurring, variable costs such as infrastructure required to host and manage the DIY solution, labor costs to develop, maintain, and scale the DIY solution, and data transmission costs. Leveraging the transparent, fixed cost structure of Amazon IoT Device Management Jobs, you know exactly what each job execution for a device will cost in addition to the data transmission costs required to facilitate the job document rollout to your device fleet and tracking the job execution status for each device. For more information, see Amazon IoT Core pricing.