Practice IoT fleet management vocabulary: device provisioning, fleet policies, OTA updates, device shadow/twin, and offline device status language.
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What is 'device provisioning' in IoT fleet management?
Device provisioning is the onboarding process: assigning a unique identity, issuing certificates, registering with the fleet management platform, and setting initial configuration. Automated provisioning (e.g., via AWS IoT Fleet Provisioning) enables zero-touch deployment at scale.
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What is an OTA (over-the-air) update in IoT?
OTA updates allow IoT operators to deploy firmware upgrades, security patches, or configuration changes to thousands of devices remotely. A robust OTA system includes rollback capability, staged rollouts, and update status tracking per device.
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When rolling out firmware 'to 10,000 devices', a best practice is to:
Staged OTA rollouts reduce risk: update 1% of devices first, check error rates and functionality, then expand to 10%, 50%, 100%. This limits blast radius if a bad firmware version is deployed to a large fleet.
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What is a 'device shadow' (or 'device twin')?
A device shadow (AWS IoT) or device twin (Azure IoT Hub) is a cloud-side state document. It stores the last reported state and the desired state. When a device reconnects after being offline, it reads the shadow to catch up on any state changes it missed.
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An operations dashboard shows 'device is offline — last seen ___ hours ago.' What does this indicate?
'Last seen X hours ago' tracks when the device last communicated with the IoT platform. Extended offline periods trigger alerts and may initiate field service workflows. Device shadow records the last known state so operators understand what the device was doing before going offline.