I&#x27;m taking a 15-minute look at their IoT developer guide (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;iot&#x2F;latest&#x2F;developerguide&#x2F;what-is-aws-iot.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;iot&#x2F;latest&#x2F;developerguide&#x2F;what-i...</a>) to get a feel for what, exactly, this service is providing. My guess is that they&#x27;re trying to compete with Thingspeak, DeviceHub, etc. I&#x27;m not totally sure I&#x27;m capturing this right, because their documentation isn&#x27;t great at &quot;getting to the point&quot;, but here&#x27;s my read:<p>1. Internet-connected stuff needs to be able to talk, so awsiot needs to support messaging. So it looks like they&#x27;re currently offering http (publish only) and mqtt (bidirectional pub&#x2F;sub). They give each awsiot account a unique IoT internet endpoint (some-random-string.iot.us-east-1.amazonaws.com), and then parse everything into a stored state in the cloud (that&#x27;s the device &quot;shadow&quot;)<p>2. Ideally you&#x27;d be doing this securely. awsiot appears to be generating its own x509 certs here, -- are they then an intermediate CA? Not clear on this. The documentation here is terribly vague and I have no idea what&#x27;s going on. Not good for transparency. I can&#x27;t even tell if they&#x27;re forcing security, or if it&#x27;s optional.<p>3. State management. awsiot cloud-stores the state of devices, allowing you to check them (or to issue commands to either from a third-party device like a phone app).<p>4. Communication between devices. They&#x27;re claiming some kind of wholly undocumented authentication system for access to and control over device state. At any rate, they have a concept of device-based identity, and then based on that identity, devices are (or aren&#x27;t) allowed to talk to each other.<p>I&#x27;ve done some IoT development, and though it&#x27;s a bit hard to tell by their terribly inadequate documentation, I&#x27;m pretty sure this is intended for enterprise developers with massive IoT product offerings and very high product volume. AWS is much too complicated for a lot of the small device manufacturers, at least the ones coming in from the hardware side. To use this scalably (especially given you can only access it from CLI) with reasonable product volumes is going to require a lot of setup scripting to register devices, and I don&#x27;t think companies will be able to afford the tooling cost until they&#x27;re enterprise-level.