AWS IoT Core

AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud service that lets internet-connected devices, from sensors and microcontrollers to industrial gateways, connect to AWS and to each other over MQTT, HTTP, and WebSockets. It handles device authentication and authorization using X.509 certificates or custom auth tokens, maintains a device registry, and keeps a device shadow (a persistent virtual representation of each device's state) so applications can read or set a device's state even when it's offline. Rules Engine lets you route incoming messages to other AWS services like Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, or Kinesis based on simple SQL-like filters, without writing custom integration code.

It's built for companies deploying fleets of connected devices at scale: manufacturers doing predictive maintenance, smart home and consumer electronics makers, logistics and asset-tracking operations, industrial and energy monitoring. The pitch is that you don't provision or manage a message broker yourself; AWS IoT Core scales from a handful of devices to billions of messages a day and integrates directly with the rest of AWS (Lambda for processing, Timestream or DynamoDB for storage, SageMaker for ML on device data, Greengrass for edge compute).

What sets it apart from running your own MQTT broker is the depth of AWS integration and the managed security model: fine-grained IAM policies per device, certificate rotation, and fleet provisioning templates for onboarding thousands of devices at once. It competes with Azure IoT Hub and Google Cloud IoT (now discontinued), and with self-hosted brokers like EMQX or HiveMQ for teams that want more control or to avoid AWS lock-in.