AWS makes it easier to onboard IoT devices in mass Amazon Web Services (AWS), has announced a new capability within its IoT Core service that allows users to automate the process for onboarding large numbers. The new fleet provisioning feature was announced in April and uses a template approach to onboarding, especially when it comes to assigning unique IDs to each device. It works with IoT Core, which is a managed service that facilitates communication between Internet of Things devices and AWS endpoints. This includes applications such as S3, Kinesis and SageMaker. While IoT Core already lets users automate device registrations and permissions assignments via its Just-In-Time-Registration and Just-In-Time-Provisioning features, creating and delivering unique identities for each device is still a time-consuming process, especially for those (such as original equipment manufacturers) that frequently need to activate hundreds of devices at a time. This feature, called fleet provisioning, is intended to simplify this process and potentially reduce manufacturing costs and development time. “Fleet Provisioning secures a unique digital ID to each device, validates it via a Lambda function and registers the identity in AWS accounts of customers. The identity is then set up with all the registry metadata and permissions (e.g. AWS stated in a blog post that Things, Thing Groups are the most important. This happens automatically when the device connects to AWS IoT Core. It also happens whenever a device requires new credentials or a modified configuration. Customers can save valuable time and engineering resources. The post explains that fleet provisioning supports two types or provisioning methods.