Spireon accelerates vehicle intelligence with managed AWS services

Starting from scratch

The need for change was driven by Spireon’s customers. They wanted more data volume on their vehicles, including the ability to track — in real-time — location and load. Reliable communication between vehicles and the platform was of paramount importance.

“It’s really important to know that when an event happens on the vehicle — such as if the doors are opened or there’s an unauthorized movement — that data is going to be received by our platform and alerts are sent in real-time to our customers,” explained Rick Gruenhagen, Spireon CTO.

He added that integration with the company’s existing AWS hosted platform was similarly important, because that would enable Spireon to transform collected data into actionable insights for customers.

Reliable remote configuration

The platform allows for the remote configuration and control of devices. “We travel across borders and in the event carrier networks are offline, AWS IoT provides something called the shadow state which is really useful,” said Gruenhagen. “If we send tasks to offline devices, the shadow state will maintain those commands in a queue. When the devices come back online, they can execute those commands.”

The device shadow provides a reliable mechanism to manage device configuration and state information, while the message broker allows ad-hoc commands to be sent to the device.

OTA firmware updates

The platform provides sophisticated over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates through AWS IoT Core Jobs Services with the delivery of firmware update instructions and binaries to all devices. The use of AWS IoT Things Graphs allows for the targeting of devices by device type, customer, firmware versions and other parameters.

A smarter future

Spireon now has tens of thousands of trailers installed — and many hundreds of thousands of images — and is thrilled with how the project went.

“Rackspace helped my team become experts in building a serverless architecture, and to be better at what we do in the IoT space through our integration with the AWS IoT platform and the incorporation of AI into our products,” said Gruenhagen. “We’re now able to provide real-time visibility to our customers and deeper insights.”