IoT Core

The device manager allows individual devices to be configured and managed securely in a coarse-grained way; management can be done through a console or programmatically. The device manager establishes the identity of a device, and provides the mechanism for authenticating a device when connecting. It also maintains a logical configuration of each device and can be used to remotely control the device from the cloud.

The protocol bridge provides connection endpoints for protocols with automatic load balancing for all device connections. The protocol bridge has native support for secure connection over industry standard protocols such as MQTT and HTTP. The protocol bridge publishes all device telemetry to Cloud Pub/Sub, which can then be consumed by downstream analytic systems.

Enable end-to-end security using asymmetric key authentication over TLS 1.2; CA signed certificates can be used to verify device ownership. Devices supporting the Cloud IoT Core security requirements can deliver full-stack security.

Connect all devices and gateways to Google Cloud over standard protocols, such as MQTT and HTTP, through the protocol endpoints, and manage all your devices as a single global system. The service uses Cloud Pub/Sub underneath, which retains data for seven days.

Use downstream analytic systems by integrating with Google Big data analytics and ML services such as Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, ML, Google Data Studio, or partner BI tools.

The service is serverless and doesn’t require any up-front software installation. It scales instantly without limits, using horizontal scaling of Google Cloud Platform.

Apply IAM roles to device registries to control user access to devices and data.

Use REST APIs to automatically manage the registration, deployment, and operation of devices at scale. Also, use the APIs to retrieve and update device properties and state even when the devices are not connected.

Send command or configuration directives to devices connected to Cloud IoT Core. Commands are fast, frequent, and one-time directives sent to devices. Configurations are persistent directives that, when using MQTT, are delivered to all subscribed devices — even ones added later.

Use a gateway to give resource-constrained devices offline operation capabilities. A gateway can perform tasks on a device’s behalf, including communicating with Cloud IoT Core, connecting to the internet, and authenticating credentials.

Use Stackdriver Monitoring to create dashboards that show data like total number of active devices in a registry. Plus, set up alerts based on metric thresholds, such as devices in a registry exceeding a preset billable data limit.

See connection and error logs in Stackdriver Logging alongside audit logs. Configure user-defined metrics to gain insights like the number of devices that published data to a specific Cloud Pub/Sub topic.