Announcing Cloud IoT Core public beta

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

By Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager, Google Cloud

At Google I/O, we introduced Google Cloud IoT Core, a fully managed service on
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help securely connect and manage IoT devices
at scale. Since then, many customers across industries such as transportation,
oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and ride-sharing have used the service and
provided us with insightful feedback.

Cloud IoT Core is now publicly available to all users in beta, and we have
introduced new set of features in this release. With Cloud IoT Core, you can
easily connect and centrally manage millions of globally dispersed IoT devices.
When used as part of the broader Google Cloud IoT solution, you can ingest all
your IoT data and connect to our state-of-the-art analytics services
including Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud
Bigtable, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine to gain
actionable insights.

Key new features

Bring your own certificate

Cloud IoT Core private beta users have asked for the ability to verify the
ownership of device keys. In addition to asymmetric key-based authentication per
individual device, users can now bring their own device key signed by their
Certificate Authority (CA), and IoT Core verifies the signature of the key provided
by the device with the CA certificate during the authentication process. This, for
example, enables device manufacturers to provision their devices offline in bulk
with their CA-issued certificate, and then register the CA certificates and the
device public keys with Cloud IoT Core.

Connect existing devices with HTTP

In addition to the standard MQTT protocol, you can now more securely connect
existing IoT devices and gateways to Cloud IoT Core over HTTP to easily ingest
data into GCP at scale.

Logical device representation

Certain use cases require an IoT application to retrieve the last state and
properties of an IoT device even when the device is not connected. Cloud IoT
Core now maintains a logical representation of the physical IoT device, including
device properties, and its last reported state. It provides APIs for your
applications to retrieve and update the device properties and state even when
the device is 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.

Our customers share feedback

Smart Parking designs, develops and produces leading-edge technology that
enables clients to manage parking efficiently and cost effectively. The company
recently introduced the latest version of its platform that expands its scope from
smart parking to smart cities. This new platform, built on GCP, leverages Cloud
IoT Core to allow input from any number of distributed devices within a city.
Smart Parking is now able to drive city-wide analytics and interconnected logic
using powerful streams of real-time data.

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. We
know exactly how our systems are performing and can push updates to devices
to ensure we deliver the best products and services as cost effectively as
possible. John Heard, Group CTO, Smart Parking Limited

Tellmeplus award-winning AI platform, Predictive Objects, leverages machine

learning and big data for predictive models in domains like customer or asset
intelligence. As such, it helps experts make faster and more accurate predictions
in IoT-based applications. By integrating Predictive Objects with Cloud IoT Core,
joint customers can deploy and run predictive models on GCP as well as inside
devices managed by Predictive Objects.

Our disruptive approach to automated embedded artificial intelligence is ideally

suited for deployment using Google Cloud IoT Core. This integration enables our
predictive models to not only run inside Google Cloud Platform but also inside
the objects themselves, whether they are connected or not, with a single point of
control and a unified management console. We are proud to have been selected
by Google to help extend the value of AI in their IoT ecosystem. Benoit
Gourdon, CEO, Tellmeplus

Partner ecosystem
We continue to work with our partners to offer devices and kits that work
seamlessly with Cloud IoT Core. You can now procure kits from our partners and
start building IoT solution relevant to your business case.

Cloud IoT Core device partners:

Allwinner Technology

Arm

Intel

Marvell

Microchip

Mongoose OS

NXP
 Realtek

Sierra Wireless

SOTEC

Pricing
We are also introducing a simple pricing plan based on the volume of data
exchanged with Cloud IoT Core. You can register as many IoT devices as you
want, and you pay only when the devices connect to and exchange data with
Cloud IoT Core. To make it simple to build quick prototypes with just a few
devices, we have added a free tier that lets you try the service at no cost.
Ready to take it for a spin? To get started check out this quick-start tutorial on
Cloud IoT Core. We look forward to your feedback and are excited to see what
you build!