Managing the Internet of Things (IoT) is a pain, things are everything and they all need to be monitored and maintained at a dauntingly large scale.
Fortunately there’s a solution coming out from Google Cloud with the public launch of Cloud IoT Core.
The company introduced Google Cloud IoT Core at its I/O event, as a fully managed service that runs on the Google Cloud Platform, and presented it as a solution to managing IoT devices at scale.
The beta version of the product is being served up as part of a broader ecosystem of IoT solutions that Google’s been developing and sits alongside its other products such as BigQuery, Pub/Sub and Dataflow.
Google Cloud IoT Core will offer functionality such as allowing users to bring their own certificates, asymmetric key-based authentication per individual device and the ability to bring their own device key signed by their Certificate Authority.
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Existing devices can be connected to the standard MQTT protocol but will also be able to connect over HTTP so that data can be ingested into GCP at scale.
The service also now maintains a logical representation of the physical IoT device, the device properties, and its last reported state, whilst also providing APIs for application to be able to gather data and update the properties of the device when it’s not connected.
“Private beta users of Cloud IoT Core have built innovative IoT solutions in a short period of time. For example, transportation and logistics firms have used it to proactively stage the right vehicles in the right places at the right times. Utilities have enabled monitoring, analysis and prediction of consumer energy usage in real-time,” said Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager, Google Cloud.
Pricing is being based on the volume of data that’s being exchanged with Cloud IoT Core, which means that users can register as many devices as they want but they will pay when devices connect and data is exchanged. Google Cloud is also offering a free tier for the first 250mb of data per month, so you can prototype to your hearts content…or until you hit 250mb and then you’ll start paying.
