Ingest telemetry messages in near real time with Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Data Firehose, and Amazon Location Service

Many organizations specializing in communications and navigation surveillance technologies are required to support multi-modal transportation supply chain markets such as road, water, air, space, and rail. One common use case is provisioning of emergency alerts services for multiple government agencies.

These organizations use third-party satellite-powered terminal devices for remote monitoring using telemetry and NMEA-0183 formatted messages generated in near real time. This post demonstrates how to implement a satellite-based remote alerting and response solution on the AWS Cloud to provide time-critical alerts and actionable insights, with a focus on telemetry message ingestion and alerts. Key services in the solution include Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Data Firehose, and Amazon Location Service.

The challenge

In the event of a disaster e.g. water flood, there is usually a lack of terrestrial data connectivity that prevents monitoring stations from taking actionable measures in real time. In the space analytics domain, many organizations deploy satellite-powered terminals on these monitoring stations.

These terminal devices transmit telemetry and NMEA-0183 formatted messages to a satellite network managed by a third-party entity, which is subsequently traversed down to an API endpoint.

Our AWS-powered solution aims to capture, enrich, and ingest satellite-powered telemetry messages as well as deliver alerts in near real time. This solution is based on AWS serverless services such as API Gateway, Data Firehose, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and is able to scale to more than a million terminal devices transmitting an hourly state of health telemetry message over the satellite.

Solution overview

This telemetry message processing begins with an API endpoint created using API Gateway, securing HTTPS transmission over a satellite network. This endpoint receives raw JSON messages and responds with an HTTP 200 success code. We take advantage of the direct integration between API Gateway and Data Firehose to ingest these messages into Amazon S3 in near real time. The default message reception limit on an API Gateway endpoint is 10,000 messages per second, which can be increased upon request.

Upon receiving messages through API Gateway, Data Firehose batches them into 60-second intervals or 1 MB size files, whichever comes first, and delivers them to Amazon S3. This configuration enables near real-time processing, which is essential for timely alerts and responses. We use the built-in features of Data Firehose, including AWS Lambda for necessary data transformation and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) for near real-time alerts. Additionally, Data Firehose converts JSON data to Parquet format before delivering it to Amazon S3, optimizing data consumption by tools like Amazon Athena, which are ideal for partitioned data formats.

To maintain up-to-date data, an AWS Glue crawler reads and updates the AWS Glue Data Catalog from transformed Parquet files. This crawler runs one time a day by default to optimize costs, but you can adjust its schedule to meet varying end-user requirements.

We use an AWS CloudFormation template to implement the solution architecture, as illustrated in the following diagram.

Cloudformation template to implement the solution architecture

For this post, we deliver sample JSON formatted telemetry messages to an API Gateway endpoint test interface to simulate the satellite-powered terminal device functionality. API Gateway integrates with Data Firehose, which uses Lambda to perform the following actions in near real time:

1. Parse the message and decode the data blob from base64 encoding to utf-8. Most third-party satellite-powered terminal devices transmit messages in an encoded format and require decoding to a standard readable format such as utf-8.
2. Use Amazon Location and append with location specifics (such as street, city, and ZIP) based on the latitude and longitude of the terminal device.
3. Detect if the solar panel battery of the terminal device is lower than the defined threshold and generate an alert through Amazon SNS to the user-provided email address. For simplicity, the CloudFormation template creates an SNS topic within the same account instead of a cross-account consumer application. You must subscribe to the topic using an email received at the provided email address.
4. Ingest the messages in an S3 bucket received in 1 minute or aggregate to 1 MB size files.

The solution uses the following key services:

• Amazon API Gateway – API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it straightforward developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the entry point for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services.
• Amazon Data Firehose – Data Firehose is an extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that reliably captures, transforms, and delivers streaming data to data lakes, data stores, and analytics services.
• AWS Glue – The AWS Glue Data Catalog is your persistent technical metadata store in the AWS Cloud. Each AWS account has one Data Catalog per AWS Region. Each Data Catalog is a highly scalable collection of tables organized into databases. A table is metadata representation of a collection of structured or semi-structured data stored in sources such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Amazon OpenSearch Service, and others.
• IAM – With AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you can specify who or what can access services and resources in AWS, centrally manage fine-grained permissions, and analyze access to refine permissions across AWS.
• AWS Lambda – Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. You can invoke Lambda functions from over 200 AWS services and software as a service (SaaS) applications, and only pay for what you use.
• Amazon Location Service – Location Service makes it straightforward for developers to add location functionality, such as maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing, to their applications without sacrificing data security and user privacy.
• Amazon S3 – Amazon S3 is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers of all sizes and industries can store and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-centered applications, and mobile apps.
• Amazon SNS – Amazon SNS sends notifications two ways: application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P). A2A provides high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging between distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications. These applications include Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Data Firehose, Lambda, and other HTTPS endpoints. A2P functionality lets you send messages to your customers with SMS texts, push notifications, and email.

Deploy the solution

AWS CloudFormation creates the API Gateway endpoint, Data Firehose delivery stream, Lambda function, Amazon Location index, SNS topic, S3 bucket, and AWS Glue database, table, and crawler. To deploy the solution, launch the CloudFormation stack and provide the following parameters:

• S3 bucket name – The bucket that stores terminal device messages ingested in near real time by the Data Firehose delivery stream
• Email address – The email of the user to subscribe for SNS alerts
• Database name – The name of the AWS Glue database

Test the solution

The following is a sample JSON state of health telemetry message transmitted by a terminal device:

{
  "packetId": 29957891,
  "deviceType": 1,
  "deviceId": 6113,
  "userApplicationId": 65535,
  "organizationId": 65681,
  "data": "eyJsbiI6LTEwNC45NTUsInNpIjowLjAsImJpIjowLjIxMiwic3YiOjAuMDA4LCJsdCI6MzkuNTc1MiwiYnYiOjMuNzI4LCJkIjoxNjU4NzQ1MzM2LCJuIjo2NjksImEiOjE3MzguMCwicyI6NS4wLCJjIjozMjAuMCwiciI6LTEwMSwidGkiOjAuMDM2fQ==",
  "len": 142,
  "status": 0,
  "hiveRxTime": "2022-07-25T13:03:29"
}

The data blob in the preceding sample telemetry message is encoded in base64. The following chart explains the metadata of each key indicating state of health and location of the terminal device.

These telemetry messages can vary based on the default configuration of the device terminal manufacturer or user definitions.

To demonstrate the capability of the solution, we send the sample telemetry message to the API Gateway endpoint through its test interface, as shown in the following screenshot.

Sending sample telemetry message

After about a minute, you should see the delivered message to Amazon S3 through Data Firehose in the stage folder.

Delivered message to Amazon S3

You should also receive an SNS alert at the provided email address.

SNS alert message

To see the results in Athena, we crawl this data with the AWS Glue crawler created by the CloudFormation template. By default, the crawler is scheduled daily to reflect newer records for the day in the stage table.

AWS Glue crawler execution

After the data is crawled successfully, you can query the results in Athena.

Query results in Athena

Best practices and considerations

Keep in mind the following best practices when implementing this solution:

• Make sure API Gateway is protected using an API key or other authorization method
• Adhere to the least privilege principle for all created users and roles to mitigate potential security breaches
• Conduct load testing of the solution using an API simulator tailored to your specific use case
• Automate the solution using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), AWS CloudFormation, or your preferred infrastructure as code (IaC) tools

Additionally, Data Firehose now supports zero buffering. For more information, refer to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports zero buffering.

Conclusion

In this post, we provided a proof of concept to implement a satellite-based remote alerting and response solution to provide time-critical alerts and actionable insights, for use cases in the space analytics domain. Make sure to adhere to AWS best practices and your organizational security policies before deploying this solution in a production environment.

Try out the solution for your own use case, and let us know your feedback and questions in the comments section.

About the authors

Srini Ponnada is a Sr. Data Architect at AWS. He has helped customers build scalable data warehousing and big data solutions for over 20 years. He loves to design and build efficient end-to-end solutions on AWS. In his spare time, he loves walking, and playing Tennis.

Munim Abbasi is currently a Sr. Data Architect at AWS with more than ten years of experience in Data & Analytics domain. Leveraging his core competencies in data architecture, design and engineering, he strives to make his customers empowered through their data by helping them deploy scalable cloud solutions adhering to AWS best practices. Outside of work, he holds great love for music, strength training and family.

Vivek Shrivastava is a Principal Data Architect, Data Lake in AWS Professional Services. He is a big data enthusiast and holds 14 AWS Certifications. He is passionate about helping customers build scalable and high-performance data analytics solutions in the cloud. In his spare time, he loves reading and finds areas for home automation.