Google Cloud has recently released a public beta of their Cloud IoT Core service, a fully managed offering for IoT messaging and device management. The service had previously been in private preview with a few customers, but the release opens the service up to all users and provides a competing solution to the IoT offerings from other cloud vendors.
The service supports bi-directional command and control semantics for millions of devices providing provisioning, device registration and device management services and communication supported over MQTT and HTTP, both industry-standard protocols.
The public release adds several new features including:
- Bringing your own certificate to allow bulk offline provisioning of devices with a customer’s own certificate authority, followed by registration of certificate and public keys with Cloud IoT Core to remove need for repurposing of devices at the point of deployment
- Support for HTTP in addition to MQTT opening-up scenarios for ingestion to a wider range of devices and gateways
- Logical device representation allowing state and configuration management for devices both on and offline
After Google introduced the service in May this year, customers from many industries, including transportation, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and ride-sharing, have been making use of it in their IoT solutions.
One such company, Smart Parking, has been leveraging Cloud IoT Core to help deliver new insights as it moves from smart parking to smart cities. Smart Parking CTO John Head said:
Our devices are heavily used and constantly send us a huge volume of data. By connecting these devices to Cloud IoT Core, we have a secure and reliable way to not only ingest that data but then also use it to gain valuable insights.
The service was developed with support of chipmaker NXP and has support from many other device and application partners including Intel, Microchip, Cisco and Arm.
As a fully managed service and part of the broader Google Cloud Platform, it can be used together with other Google cloud services since it connects natively to services for distribution, analytics, storage and insight such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine.
There is an API layer for device registration and operation that can also be used to retrieve and update device properties and state for when devices are offline ready for when they reconnect.
When used with Google’s Android Things hardware and SDK, devices are able to receive firmware updates automatically.
Pricing is straightforward and based on the volume of data ingested each month, with three tiers that make it easier to understand ongoing costs. To give the opportunity to test and build simple prototypes, Google has added a free tier that is good for data volumes up to 250MB per month.
|
Tier |
Price |
Data Volume (per month) |
|
Free |
$0.00 |
First 250MB |
|
Standard |
$0.0045 per MB |
250MB to 250GB |
|
$0.0020 per MB |
250GB to 5TB |
|
|
$0.00045 per MB |
5TB and above |
The Cloud IoT Core platform puts Google in the market with a solution that is comparable with those from the other large cloud providers such as Amazon AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT Hub and IBM Watson IoT.