AWS IoT

AWS IoT (Internet of Things) will be used in our solution to handle serverless notifications. Although the name indicates the usage of IoT devices, we will use this service exclusively for users connected through browsers. This is becasuse hooking a web page into a notification service to receive updates, through a subscription mechanism and not data polling, requires the usage of WebSockets, which are supported by IoT and not supported by Amazon SNS. So, although the IoT name may sound as a strange choice, we will use it because it is the only AWS service capable of handling our use case.

AWS IoT implements the publish-subscribe pattern using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. We will see code examples in Chapter 9, Handling Serverless Notifications, while implementing live comments for product review pages of our sample website.