Practical – operating and monitoring a joke creator with IoT Greengrass – Operating and Monitoring IoT Networks

by Keitra Marche AWS Certification Exam, Continuous operation of IoT systems, Monitoring ingested data

In this exercise, we will walk through the process of creating an AWS IoT Greengrass group for edge computing. We will start by creating a new AWS IoT Greengrass group and configuring its core settings. Next, we will create a device definition and add it to the group, along with the Lambda functions and subscriptions needed for edge processing. Finally, we will deploy the AWS IoT Greengrass group to our local devices and verify that it is working as expected.

By the end of this exercise, you will have a solid understanding of how to set up an AWS IoT Greengrass group for edge computing and how to deploy it to your local devices. You will be able to leverage this knowledge to build powerful and scalable IoT applications that can process data locally and communicate with the cloud in a seamless and efficient manner.

Setting up your OpenAI account

To start off with the practical, we will need to set up our OpenAI account, which will allow us to then use ChatGPT. The following steps will guide you through doing this:

Sign up on OpenAI’s website:

  1. Go to OpenAI’s website.
  2. Click on the Sign Up or Get Started button.
  3. Fill out your information including your name, email, and password.
  4. Accept the terms and conditions and submit the form.

Confirm your email:

  1. After you have signed up, OpenAI will send you a verification email.
  2. Open the email and click on the verification link. This will verify your account and allow you to continue the process.

Get your API key:

  1. Navigate to the OpenAI website at https://platform.openai.com/.
  2. Click on your account on the top right and click on View API Keys.
  3. You will find the API key creation page here. Click on Create new secret key, copy the API key, and save it for later.

Remember to keep your API key safe and do not share it with anyone. Treat it like a password, as anyone who has it can make API requests under your account and you will be charged for them.

Finally, always make sure that the way you’re using OpenAI’s API follows its usage policies. If it determines that your usage is not in compliance, it may disable your API key.

Spinning up an Amazon EC2 instance

Now, we will need to create an EC2 instance to act as the intermediary of where we are going to call the ChatGPT API from:

Log in to the AWS Management Console: Access the AWS Management Console at https://aws.amazon.com/console/ and sign in with your AWS account.

Go to the Amazon EC2 dashboard: Click on Services at the top of the page and search for EC2 under Compute to go to the Amazon EC2 dashboard.

Create a new instance: Click on the Instances link in the left-side menu. Then click the Launch Instance button.

Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI): You will see a list of available AMIs. Select the Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM) option. This is a general-purpose Linux instance that is maintained by AWS.

Choose an instance type: On the next page, select an instance type that fits your requirements. For this practical, you can start with a small instance type, such as t2.micro, which is eligible for the free tier. Click Next: Configure Instance Details.

Configure instance details: You can leave most options at their default settings. However, be sure to select the appropriate VPC and subnet, if necessary. Enable Auto-assign Public IP if you want AWS to assign a public IP address to your instance for remote access.

Add storage: Click Next: Add Storage. By default, Amazon Linux instances come with 8 GB of root volume. You can adjust this according to your needs.

Add tags: Click Next: Add Tags. You can assign key-value pairs as tags to your instance. This is optional but can help you manage your AWS resources.

Configure security group: Click Next: Configure Security Group. You can create a new security group or assign an existing one. At a minimum, you should allow SSH access (port 22) from your IP address for remote management of your instance.

Review and launch: Click Next: Review and Launch. Review your instance configuration. If everything is satisfactory, click Launch.

Key pair: A pop-up window will ask you to select an existing key pair or create a new one. This key pair is used to SSH into your instance. If you create a new one, be sure to download it and keep it secure.

Launch instance: Click Launch Instance after selecting your key pair. Your instance will now be launched.

Now you can SSH into your instance by clicking on the instance ID at the top of the page and clicking Connect. Navigate to the EC2 Instance Connect pane, choose Connect Using EC2 Instance Connect, and click on Connect.

With that, we have spun up the EC2 instance we need and connected to it. Now, we are ready to configure AWS Greengrass on it to simulate our IoT thing.