How to Consume Data at Scale on AWS

One of the projects I help design solutions for is a telematics platform called Data Intrans, it was my first foray into the world of big-data and IoT. As we’re a software company and not a hardware company, we prefer to purchase readily available telematics/IoT hardware as opposed to developing our own (allowing us to do what we do best). This does have a downside as all hardware vendors transmit their data in many different ways and structures. The great thing about the platform we’ve built is our flexibility to consume data from devices made by different vendors and normalize it for use within our web and mobile apps.

One of the solutions we designed was for use within fixed areas, based on LoRAWAN technology. If you’ve never heard of LoRAWAN, it’s a protocol for wide area networks which connect hardware tracking devices within a defined area wirelessly to a gateway which has internet connectivity. The physical devices themselves do not have internet connectivity as they are low powered, usually have GPS and some kind of sensors (eg. temperature, g-force etc). The batteries can last for weeks or months on a device which does not receive power from the asset it’s attached to. An example of how we might use this kind of implementation would be for tracking shopping trolleys within a shopping mall and it’s surroundings (ie. carparks) to ensure they don’t leave the property.