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It's an acquisition from 2017 but do you happen to know why Amazon bought FreeRTOS?

hashtag-til 3y ago
I think it boils down to "because they can".
kqr2 3y ago
Amazon missed the boat on mobile phone operating systems. They tried to make their own phone but that was a massive failure. By buying FreeRTOS and building up the ecosystem, they were hoping to own the OS for IOTs.
joezydeco 3y ago
My belief is that Amazon sees IoT as a way to further grow AWS backend services. All those nodes need a cloud, somewhere. Taking stewardship of FreeRTOS allows them to develop a SDK, with or without a hardware kit included, to encourage IoT developers to lock into the Amazon ecosystem. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.... Microsoft saw this chain of events and panicked, buying up ThreadX to create Azure RTOS. I believe MS is now abandoning this path and focusing on other green fields...the recent events with OpenAI being a huge signal.
wyldfire 3y ago
Amazon is heavily marketing AWS ro automotive R&D teams. They want them to run their software on Graviton nodes for near-hw performance. And they have virtio-everything interfaces for you to use so your core functionality can be tested in AWS and you have some kind of hypervisor to partition and/or abstract the real HW interfaces. A "software defined vehicle" [1]. Those R&D teams spend a small fortune on devboards with each new generation and only use them for ~a couple years or so. So renting time on AWS is appealing because it's not depreciating capital and because they can be more flexible in how they adjust spending to suit development cycle phases where they need more/fewer concurrent units. Having freertos allows them to have credible experts in the space their customers are working in, and they can make design changes to freertos to suit this SDV concept. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/ https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/
- Szpadel 3y ago
  that's really cool idea, but for such r&d local hardware/vm seems to be more ergonomic for attaching debugger and if you have to create such abstractions anyways, I'm not sure if dev board with second CPU or FPGA for hw emulation wouldn't be better way to handle it, as this would allow you to reuse same boats between generations

I think it boils down to "because they can".

kqr2 3y ago

Amazon missed the boat on mobile phone operating systems. They tried to make their own phone but that was a massive failure. By buying FreeRTOS and building up the ecosystem, they were hoping to own the OS for IOTs.

joezydeco 3y ago

My belief is that Amazon sees IoT as a way to further grow AWS backend services. All those nodes need a cloud, somewhere. Taking stewardship of FreeRTOS allows them to develop a SDK, with or without a hardware kit included, to encourage IoT developers to lock into the Amazon ecosystem. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/freertos/latest/userguide/c-sdk.... Microsoft saw this chain of events and panicked, buying up ThreadX to create Azure RTOS. I believe MS is now abandoning this path and focusing on other green fields...the recent events with OpenAI being a huge signal.

wyldfire 3y ago

Amazon is heavily marketing AWS ro automotive R&D teams. They want them to run their software on Graviton nodes for near-hw performance. And they have virtio-everything interfaces for you to use so your core functionality can be tested in AWS and you have some kind of hypervisor to partition and/or abstract the real HW interfaces. A "software defined vehicle" [1]. Those R&D teams spend a small fortune on devboards with each new generation and only use them for ~a couple years or so. So renting time on AWS is appealing because it's not depreciating capital and because they can be more flexible in how they adjust spending to suit development cycle phases where they need more/fewer concurrent units. Having freertos allows them to have credible experts in the space their customers are working in, and they can make design changes to freertos to suit this SDV concept. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/ https://aws.amazon.com/automotive/software-defined-vehicle/

Szpadel 3y ago
that's really cool idea, but for such r&d local hardware/vm seems to be more ergonomic for attaching debugger and if you have to create such abstractions anyways, I'm not sure if dev board with second CPU or FPGA for hw emulation wouldn't be better way to handle it, as this would allow you to reuse same boats between generations