Google has a new IoT cloud service named Google Cloud IoT Core. The service advertises itself as fully managed, and designed from the ground up to target IoT devices. Beyond managing IoT devices, the service lets you integrate Google’s analytics service for advanced device analytics, visualizations, machine learning, and more. Google advertises that the core will scale automatically in response to demand like AWS.
The Cloud IoT core has some services that make it ideal for IoT devices:
- Firmware update support via Android Things
- Firmware update via your own device update service hosted on Google Cloud IoT Core
- Device Manager to track unique device ID’s, and tag data with those device ID’s
- MQTT support, a standard communication protocol in the IoT industry
- Certificate based authentication and TLS 1.2
- Support for RESTful APIs
- Support for analytics tools like Dataflow, BigQuery, Bigtable, MK, Data Studio, etc.
Google’s Cloud IoT Core is available for free beta testing now. Pricing tiers have not been announced yet, but we will update this post when they are. Glow Labs has signed up for the Cloud IoT Core to test it against it’s competitors for our projects.
