-Advertising-
In the slew of announcements made on Wednesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a version of a lightweight operating system called Amazon FreeRTOS that is designed to run on small connected devices with severe constraints on processing power.
FreeRTOS was developed by Richard Barry in 2003 (who joined Amazon last year) as an open source real time embedded operating system for those types of devices, and the new version unveiled by AWS Wednesday is designed to extend its IoT and edge computing strategy down to very small devices.
Here’s a description on the official Website:
Developed in partnership with the world’s leading chip companies over a 14 year period, the FreeRTOS kernel is a market leading real time operating system (or RTOS), and the de-facto standard solution for microcontrollers and small microprocessors.
- FreeRTOS is downloaded every 120 seconds (on average, during 2016).
- FreeRTOS came top in class in every EETimes Embedded Market Survey since 2011, which was the first year it was included.
- FreeRTOS offers lower project risks and a lower total cost of ownership than commercial alternatives because:
- It is fully supported and documented.
- Most people take products to market without ever contacting us, but with the complete peace of mind that they could opt to switch to a fully indemnified commercial license (with dedicated support) at any time.
- Some FreeRTOS ports never completely disable interrupts.
- For strict quality control purposes, and to remove all IP ownership ambiguity, official FreeRTOS code is separated from community contributions.
- FreeRTOS has a tick-less mode to directly support low power applications.