Amazon Location Service Features

Amazon Location Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy to add location functionality to your applications. With Amazon Location Service, you can build applications that provide maps and points of interest, convert street addresses into geographic coordinates, calculate routes, track resources, and trigger actions based on location. Amazon Location Service uses high-quality geospatial data to provide maps, places, routes, trackers, and geofences. In addition to these capabilities, Amazon Location Service helps you maintain control of your data for privacy and security. It enables you to access location data simply with developer tools, and also move your applications to production faster with included monitoring and management capabilities.

Maps help you visualize location information and are the foundations of many location-based service capabilities. Amazon Location Service provides map tiles of different styles sourced from global location data providers Esri, HERE, and GrabMaps. The map tiles from Esri, HERE, and GrabMaps are trusted by many customers worldwide and have been continually fine-tuned over the decades for a wide range of customer applications. Along with the high-quality options from Esri, HERE, and GrabMaps, Open Data Maps provides developers with the ability to incorporate data into their applications in more flexible ways.

Amazon Location Service Places enables your application to offer point-of-interest search functionality, convert addresses into geographic coordinates in latitude and longitude (geocoding), and convert a coordinate into a street address (reverse geocoding). Amazon Location Service sources high-quality geospatial data from Esri, HERE, and GrabMaps so you can use them to improve the quality and the versatility of your address database. To visualize Places on a map, for example to display search results, simply add one of the service's front-end mobile or web software SDKs to your application. Then, you can use sample code in the developer guide to add a search box to a map and display the results.

With Amazon Location Routes, your application can request the travel time, distance, and directions between a departure point and one or more destinations, with specific travel restrictions such as Truck mode, vehicle dimension, and avoidances. Amazon Location Service provides routing data sourced from global location data providers Esri, HERE, and GrabMaps. This enables your application to obtain accurate estimates of travel time based on up-to-date roadway information and live traffic information. Amazon Location Service Routes can help you achieve business goals such as faster delivery and reduced fuel consumption. To use Routes, simply add one of the Amazon Location Service SDKs to your application. Sample code in the Amazon Location Service developer guide shows you how to display routes on a map and populate origin-destination matrices.

With Amazon Location Service Trackers, you can instantly retrieve current and historical location of devices running your tracking-enabled application. This gives you the ability to use the location history of your devices to optimize operations such as inventory placements, manufacturing sequencing, or delivery dispatch. You can also link Trackers with Amazon Location Service Geofences to automatically evaluate location updates from your devices against your geofences. Trackers can help you reduce costs by filtering out position updates from devices that haven't moved, before storing or evaluating them against geofences. The sensitive location information of your tracked devices, such as facility, asset, or personnel locations, is processed and retained only in your account. This helps you shield sensitive information from third parties, protect user privacy, and reduce your application’s security risks. To track an asset, simply add one of the service’s front-end mobile or web SDKs to any device, and start sending location updates to your Amazon Location Service Tracker. Once asset locations are in your Tracker, you can use sample code in the Amazon Location Service developer guide to display them on an Amazon Location Service Map.

Amazon Location Service Geofences gives your application the ability to detect and act when a tracked device enters or exits a geographical boundary you define as a geofence. When a breach of the geofence is detected, Amazon Location Service automatically sends the entry or exit event to Amazon EventBridge, which can then trigger downstream actions, such as sending a notification to a restaurant that a delivery driver is nearby. This event-driven setup makes it easy for your application to scale in size and sophistication as needed. To get started with geofences, use one of the Amazon Location Service SDKs or console to create your geofences.

With Amazon Location Service, you retain control of your organization’s data. Amazon Location Service anonymizes all queries sent to data providers by removing customer metadata and account information. Additionally, sensitive tracking and geofencing location information, such as facility, asset, or personnel locations is always encrypted at rest and in transit. This helps you shield sensitive information from third parties, protect your user privacy, and reduce organizational security risks. Amazon Location Service also integrates with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), enabling the use of your existing keys to encrypt your tracking and geofencing data.

With Amazon Location Service, you retain all rights to your organization’s data. Amazon Location Service licensing terms do not grant Amazon or third parties rights to sell your data or use it for advertising, for instance when you display your data on a map, perform a search, or request a route.

Amazon Location Service integrates with proven AWS security services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Cognito, so you can move to production faster by using existing identity management and authentication tools to help keep your application secure both for your administrators and your application users. API calls made from any of the Amazon Location Service SDKs are secured through the AWS Signature Version 4 signing process for authentication. You can use one of the Amazon Location Service SDKs with your AWS IAM or Amazon Cognito authentication. These SDKs will sign the API calls and use these established technologies to help keep your data secure.

Amazon Location Service is integrated with AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon EventBridge, so you can efficiently provision and manage resources, monitor health metrics, and automatically act upon events. With AWS CloudFormation, create templates with Amazon Location Service to consistently and quickly provision resources. Using Amazon CloudWatch, you can monitor your metrics on service usage and health, including requests, latency, and faults, so you don’t have to build your own health monitoring tools. Amazon Location Service is integrated with AWS CloudTrail for logging and continuously monitoring your account activity. Integration with Amazon EventBridge enables an event-driven application architecture so you can use AWS Lambda functions to activate parts of your application and workflows. In addition, you can use tags to help manage, identify, organize, search for, and filter your Amazon Location Service resources in one view. You can create tags to categorize resources by purpose, owner, environment, or billing relationships.

Amazon Location Service offers a variety of tools for developers to build location-enabled applications. These include the standard AWS SDKs, front-end mobile and web SDKs, and sample code to combine it with open source libraries such as MapLibre. In the Amazon Location Service Console, developers can learn and get started quickly with a visual and interactive learning tool that enables them to explore the service’s different geolocation capabilities. To build more robust applications, Amazon Location Service also provides solution guides for geomarketing, asset tracking, and delivery. With these resources, you can reduce time to production by using the tool and documentation that best matches your development environment and use case. Access these tools and resources through the Amazon Location Service Console, the AWS tools website, and the AWS documentation.