hello everyone and welcome to iot 206 building the future of connected homes with aws iot my name is mary miller and i'm a worldwide go to market specialist with aws iot and i'm really excited to be joined here today by one of our customers traeger grills with me from traeger is bart strong who's the director of digital product management and ryan tarver who's the director of cloud iot and data first i'm going to talk about how smart home products have been evolving and how aws iot helps builders on this connected product journey and then we'll hear trager share their own story of building and scaling their connected wi-fi or grills at the end of the session you'll have an understanding of how managed services and aws iit can help you accelerate and scale your own product innovation last year we spent time talking about the evolution of products we understand that as device builders you are tasked with constant iteration and innovation and as we meet with device manufacturers we find that companies typically fall into one of three categories today first maybe you're building a new product whether that's to evolve or even disrupt an existing product that doesn't have connectivity so think of like a pet collar second maybe maybe you've been creating electronic products for a while maybe that product even has a microcontroller but you haven't yet added connectivity and you're looking to do so and then there's companies that may have been doing iot for a while and have a fleet of connected devices but you're looking to scale more efficiently or take the next step and make those devices smarter and depending on which phase a builder starts out in we see an evolution in the way connected products are built and deployed devices are connected to the cloud and you can enable basic command and control and data ingestion and as more and more devices come online builders manage and secure entire fleets enable performance monitoring and updating devices over the air and taking it a step further you might want to make that device smarter or begin to introduce new features to your customers and of course throughout this whole journey product builders have to think about scale not just how do i get started today but how do i scale from hundreds or thousands to hundreds of thousands or millions of devices how do i enable my team to continue to add functionality and intelligence how do i do all this with the resources i have and how do i manage costs all while driving greater performance efficiency and the output of this connectivity and this scale and the evolution to connected devices intelligent connected products is that companies are typically able to create new business models and revenue streams and that's your competitive differentiator so as that journey is happening on the product side product builders go through an evolution too if you're a connected product builder your mission is growth right so your goal is more customers using more of your devices to do more things so from the outset you've got a plan to enable that scale you've got a plan to build in such a way that you spend your time figuring out how to deliver new experiences to customers not managing device fleets and operations the way you enable that scale is through managed services that allow you to offload infrastructure operations so you can direct resources towards differentiating your business aws iot provides managed services for many critical iot functions and we're introducing new capabilities every day so when you think about your journey you're going to want to start from the beginning thinking about aws iot now not everyone is going to start from the same place some of you may be in this first camp where you're starting out with minimal iot experience and you might be familiar with embedded development but not cloud computing or the vi or the reverse right familiar with cloud computing but not embedded development or you might be looking to develop all of these skills and so you could spend a lot of time doing that and you're asking things like what kind of chip set will i use how do i add connectivity how do i command and control my devices if you're here you're in the fortunate position that you can actually begin your journey planning an architecture around managed services some builders may be in a position where you've already adopted basic cloud or iot services or built your own but you might be spending most of your time maintaining that system right so so you're more focused on infrastructure and resource management maybe that means you're using manual processes to manage devices and make updates you might be asking how do i manage my fleet of devices more efficiently how do i monitor performance how do i send updates over the air how do i secure all my devices if you're at this stage aws iot makes it easy to adopt our services or to migrate to our services and you're actually going to hear from traeger girls who did just that in the second half of this presentation and finally some builders might already be leveraging managed services and if you're in this group you're getting better at scaling devices and security and updates serverless computing is freeing up your time to write applications instead of managing instances and ideally you're spending more time focusing on the end-to-end customer journey and and building those experiences that you want to create for customers so that can be you know adding intelligence to your devices offering new features maybe enabling predictive maintenance through machine learning so i'd like to share a few examples of customers who have gone through this evolution and continue to grow on aws iot vizio manages millions of tvs on aws iot and you know throughout their journey they've continued to add new capabilities around analytics and they've also implemented alexa voice functionality irobot launched the first connected roomba in 2015 and they actually shifted their platform to aws iot shortly after they realized they needed to be able to build and run their smart home applications without managing servers last year irobot surpassed 30 million devices sold and they handled holiday spikes of over 20 times their normal traffic using aws iot electronic caregiver is improving the way patients get care in their homes by deploying machine learning models onto devices using aws iot green grass and finally when it came time to build their instinct light switch idevices wanted to push the envelope even further by including alexa voice control directly on the product and with aws iot they were able to do that and they brought their product to market in just four months that's compared to the 12 to 18 month cycles that they had seen previously we're proud of what these customers have been able to achieve and there are similar experiences for many connected product makers in virtually every home segment around the world based on the strength of our platform and the success of our customers aws iot was named the best consumer iot solution at iot world 2020 and as we carry that momentum forward this year we look to the future to see how these products and experiences will continue to evolve here's what we think first products will continue to become predictive so homes will anticipate their owner's needs second products will become more and more automated as they respond to owner's needs or personal preferences before even being prompted and of course the cycle of innovation and iteration will become continuous as connected products are able to constantly improve and offer new experiences to consumers my guess is actually that none of these predictions will surprise you as the builders of this future you are tasked with bringing these experiences to bear and you likely have your own detailed predictions of what your customers will want and expect next and you're going to want to plan for how you enable those capabilities so you know for example how quickly are your device fleets going to grow will you have a diversity of hardware products within those fleets how will you onboard those devices how will you update them and secure them how quickly will those devices need to respond in the field and and these are just a few things that it's important to consider as you build look towards building this future and this is where aws iot comes in we think about iot by asking three fundamental questions first how can i build devices that operate at the edge then how can i control manage and secure those devices at scale and of course the reason why you do the first two things how can i make sense of my iot data and take appropriate action so these are the managed services within the aws iot suite that provide that undifferentiated heavy lifting at each stage of the iot cycle we think about these services as a circle not as a traditional application stack so you have devices that sense and collect and send data to the cloud using aws iot device software in the cloud you have connectivity and control services that help you manage and secure those devices and you you can then use analytics services to extract insight from that data which you can in turn use to build intelligent machine learning models and you can then deploy machine learning models back onto the devices and take local action and now these devices can act in a more intelligent way which gives you more sensing and generates more data to send back to the cloud and make sense of and you keep doing that continuously and devices get more intelligent over time this is what we call the iot virtuous cycle and it enables the continuous evolution that you as product builders have to achieve as i mentioned earlier this suite of services is recognized as the best consumer iot solution and the individual managed services that make up this suite are also award-winning for example aws iot device defender was named the best iot security solution by iot world in 2019. okay here's an example of how these services are used in a connected product architecture on the left-hand side you've got your things your your connected devices smaller devices so things like light bulbs door locks or thermostats will typically run free rtos while larger devices like a security camera or a router or a gateway will run aws iot green grass now your free rtos devices can also connect to your aws iot green grass devices and form a local network so that they can all continue operating even if they lose connectivity and you can use machine learning models to deploy them to your greengrass device so in this example say you want to enable that security camera to detect when a friend has arrived and unlock the door all while sending a communication to your mobile app to let you know that they've arrived if you want to integrate voice functionality the alexa voice service integration enables you to integrate alexa with those microcontroller-based devices while offloading the memory and compute tasks to the cloud that actually reduces the e-bill materials cost by up to 50 percent and provides a cost-effective way for you to include alexa functionality with your products moving to the right you've got cloud services aws iot core is our message broker and rules engine but it also allows you to provision manage and secure devices at scale with aws iot device management you can easily register a fleet of devices at once with bulk certificate registration you can group that fleet into categories or hierarchies and you can then query those groups and aggregate devices using fleet indexing and with jobs you can push software and firmware updates to the two devices in the field over the air as you ingest data you can process that data and use it to take action on the device so for example with aws iot device defender you can continuously audit your iot configurations with aws iot events you can create alerts that trigger action and you can use aws iot analytics to filter transform and enrich iot data before you store it in a time series database for analysis and then all the way on the right your connected products integrate and interact with users whether that's through mobile devices the aws console or third-party apis so as your device fleets grow to the thousands or millions all of those capabilities that we covered that you know are required to manage and secure those devices that grows exponentially too and that's not including the resources you'll need to keep introducing new capabilities and keep you know building more and more features so we found or actually our customers have found that building all of those iot machine learning and data capabilities on your own the choice is often not feasible whether that's from an economic standpoint or a resource standpoint no matter where you are on that journey aws iot provides services and solutions to help you scale efficiently so if you're just getting started we can help you choose a qualified chipset or device with our aws partner device catalog and we provide device software that helps you connect those devices quickly and securely if you're looking to scale we help you on board secure and manage fleets detect anomalies and update devices over the air and all the while as you incorporate these services in your product architecture you free up developer time to focus on building new experiences and writing applications and so then your developers can focus on adding things like voice control with the alexa voice service integration or building machine learning models so you can perform complex actions like predictive maintenance or condition monitoring and of course aws iot partners are available at every stage to assist you should you want that support to sum this up aws iot frees you up to focus on your core business building the products and experiences that your consumers love and with that i'd like to turn it over to traeger grills to tell you their own story of using aws and aws iot hi i'm bart strong i'm the director of digital product management at trager i'm so excited to be here today um and super thankful to aws for inviting traeger to come tell our story so traeger is the original pellet grill traeger was invented over 30 years ago and in 2014 our current ceo jeremy andrus formerly of skull candy took over traeger and turned it into the brand it is today before that time it was a great product with little direction the invention of the pellet grill was the first real disruption to the barbecue industry since the introduction of proping the next big disruption came when trager released our first wi-fire or iot grille in 2017. when traeger first launched wi-fi we weren't on aws we had put together a platform using several software and cloud solutions we quickly realized that this would not scale and we decided to migrate to another cloud solution our second solution it was okay but still wasn't a complete solution we had the broker in one system user authentication and another user management in another and all of our data was even in another system moving to aws has been one of the best decisions we have made aws has consolidated all of our technologies into a single place allowing us to gain efficiencies and really focus on our customer experience i now get to dream big and as a product manager this is the greatest place to be prior to aws it took us sometimes days to get some basic analytics during a cooking cycle we get about a message every three seconds so if you think of those long 12 to 24 hour cooks the number of messages adds up very quickly this amount of data quickly rules out using traditional data storage solutions with our aws implementation we've been able to take queries that were taking hours to return down to seconds this allows traeger to create a dashboard and make decisions very quickly so why did trager decide to connect a grill at traeger we believe in bringing friends and family together around great food and memorable experiences the wi-fi air technology connects grills to the cloud to make cooking easier by providing the ability to check in monitor and control your grill it simplifies the customer experience enabling flexibility and control to do this anywhere anytime so before wifi we really didn't understand our customers and how they were using our grills today we have the st have all this data that is helping us improve the entire cooking experience from the initial prep to the final cleanup so trigger is typically seen as a smoker although our grills are capable of cooking just about everything this type of cooking usually is done at low temperatures for long periods of time this means that you are tied to your grill for hours at a time connecting to your grill now means you're free to leave the grill and monitor your cook from anywhere like your kid's soccer game or the store or anywhere you might actually need to go so another great feature is traeger has over 1300 available recipes available in our app with the simple press of a button these cooking instructions for that recipe are sent to your grill where the grill now takes over and manages each step of the cooking process having an iot grill also means that you can be notified when you need to stop and go check on your food and see how it's coming another really great feature is our integration with alexa it means that you it's easy to operate your grill when your hands are full or dirty imagine standing in your kitchen prepping your food and having the option to ask alexa when will my food be done at traeger we have made that idea a reality with our partnership with aws and alexa another reason we wanted to connect a grill is personalization knowing how and when a grill is used allows traeger to recommend and suggest when to purchase pellets what recipes you may like and even how and when to clean or care for your grill does extensive testing on every grill before it goes to the mass production but because our grills are outdoors we can't always simulate all those conditions so having the ability to get data from grills all over the world makes it so that we can take this data and tune each one of the grills to perform better these are just a few of the benefits our digital and product roadmap are full of new ways we can take care of the take advantage of the aws platform to improve all aspects of the cooking experience like i mentioned before we introduced wi-fi technology in 2017 but this was only available to our top of the line grill in 2019 we released this technology in more of our grills taking it from the top tier grills down to the everyday grill making wi-fire more accessible to all of our customers then in 2020 we added wi-fire to our costco lineup girls once again expanding the number of traeger customers that can benefit from a connected cooking experience wi-fi air has become an important feature to our customers this feature is often a key factor in deciding what grill to purchase and i've heard it first hand from many of our customers that this was the deciding factor i'm really excited about our partnership with aws and the future roadmap it holds we have many great ideas and many great things to come and now i'm going to turn the time over to ryan tarver who will be talking about trager's aws implementation hi i'm ryan tarbert director of cloud iot and data for traeger let's recap real quick what we've covered triggers this amazing brand with world-class teams and product sales marketing and many others all with a consistent track record of delivering an amazing customer experience year after year now in order to assist and accelerate what these teams have accomplished this new discipline of digital experience has been underway to disrupt the industry so how do you plan and execute a digital experience in order to enhance that organization's pedigree of excellence let's get into our details of where we started and where we're going as you begin to break down this value proposition of creating new platforms from scratch and or migration here are some of the things that need to be considered the scalability this includes your infrastructure services applications data insights and so on all the short term and long term requirements need to be considered your production migration any new platform or experience needs to include plans not only to migrate users to the new platform but also not affect the experience in the negative way that you currently have the platform this is basic questions like on-premise single or multi-cloud security which includes compliance and data privacy single region or multi-region if you're an international brand all need to be factors as well your costs you really want to partner with aws and your finance teams to ensure every step of your architecture engineering and your deployment are considered with the overhead availability and reliability is huge you really should rely on aws the managed services serverless capabilities and all the modern architectures to automate as much as possible now with all these things considered a very big challenge will be finding the right professionals to lead these efforts your leaders need to be experts with marketing technology traditional i.t cloud web mobile data product management and even customer experience finding all of that in one is a very tall order once you have your leaders they then need to recruit and mentor tactical delivery experts to build this new ecosystem in just a few short months when other teams and historical projects may take years now it's not just about the base platform provider that you're going to want to look for but also what they bring in terms of managed and complementary services and the tools that come with that provider the overwhelming leader in this cloud space we all know is aws there will also be gaps in economies of scale to capture with the right professional services group so traeger was pleased to find a group called ost that our aws and iot experts through them we found many others to help augment our teams as well let's get into our platform the digital experience team was asked to build a brand new iot platform and a data lake in just three short months these two platforms needed to be available and run in parallel to the legacy system from day one of the launch and then persist until all the users migrated months later now if that timeline isn't shocking enough over the next three months the digital experience team was then asked to launch a new website and two new mobile apps completely new platforms frameworks code base and user experience so within six months of the digital experience team starting at traeger all four platforms were launched and running at scale not just service not just to service the current millions of customers but enable traeger to now scale with exponential growth of the company none of this would have been remotely possible without the competitive advantage aws brings and an extremely small digital experience team and a very small professional services footprint was able to deliver four world-class platforms to match the brand of excellence traeger has shown year in and year out well here's the high level aws architecture that we deployed to service the iot platform we focused heavily on managed services that are serverless our grills firmware sends a secure message to aws iot core and then it routes and triggers hundreds of services and pipelines to connect all four platforms in order to give users updates as well as that command and control back to the grills this architecture can scale to service tens of thousands to tens of millions of devices all with event driven requirements this really is the the engine or the the spinal cord of the ecosystem the platform itself is extremely complex and important however you need to consider how to deliver the complete digital experience integrating the mobile apps and the website are key factors but there is a lingering question what do you do with all this data you quickly run into traditional big data problems cost issues and time of delivery for those insights here's a high level of what the data lake architecture looks like in aws and these fulfill all the needs from iot again we focus heavily on managed services that are serverless and the secret really isn't in which services to use but how do you configure and orchestrate all these tools together in concert you'll quickly need service analytics requests for event driven data as well as historical data at rest now this architecture allows you to do both and it's at minimal cost without sacrificing performance and honestly in some cases it will increase performance well here's the growth we started down in 2019 with our digital experience journey of launching and planning these new platforms and you can see how fast our data footprint grows in terms of volume transactions one of the most amazing things about partnering with aws is the cost and economies of scale over time we're really excited to continue that excellence of delivering digital experience as we grow and our platforms scale out now is traeger just a brand sales and durable product company anymore our current and future state shows us worthy of being a world-class digital company as well now all of the traeger teams work as a unified group in order to deliver the ultimate customer experience in this industry all made possible because of our decision in ongoing partnership with aws thank you for the opportunity to share our aws story i'll hand it back to you mary barton ryan thank you for sharing your story hearing you guys talk about your experience it really illuminates how product makers can innovate and scale without sacrificing performance or efficiency if you're watching this at home and you want to learn more we've got a ton of resources to help you learn and get started just follow the links on the screen and of course please remember to take the survey after the session and let us know what you think
2021-02-07