
Google’s new IoT Core service helps businesses manage their IoT data and devices - tdrnd
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/google-launches-cloud-service-to-manage-internet-of-things-data/
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lai
This is great and all except I had registered the company I work for to be on
the private beta, and have not heard anything for weeks. There's not even a
place or number or email to contact, it's just a Google Form. I even signed up
for their Brillo/Weave program (now Android Things), and also heard nothing
back. You either have to have some internal connection to get any attention or
just wait for their service to go into production, which is God knows when.

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RhodesianHunter
One of the many reasons AWS is eating their lunch.

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iot_devs
It is more than one year that I work with IoT and honestly I don't have
understood the google offert.

I had the pleasure to work with IoT and the Lora protocol writing and managing
a Lora network server, the piece of software that takes Lora messages send
through radio and decode them from radio -> udp -> MQTT (encrypted) -> MQTT
(clear) [shameless plug, I packed my experience in an on-premises service:
[http://loranetworkserver.com/](http://loranetworkserver.com/) ]

The difficult part I believe is this one, after you got the MQTT message in
clear what you do with it is quite simple, straightforward and overall a
solved problem (unless you are not getting millions of messages per seconds,
but very few businesses have such load).

From what I understood from the google page they are solving the simpler
problem of getting the data from an MQTT message and save it to disk, and
maybe use later for data mining. It is weird because I wouldn't accept to have
my data saved in someone else disk, at the bare minimum I would require to
have the data duplicated in some standard (pg, MySQL, mongo) db (even a db
managed by AWS or Google, but a standard one that I can move at will).

It doesn't seems the most valuable piece of architecture that they could
develop.

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petra
The real valueble piece would be probably something up the stack, maybe
similar to the great offering of thingworx, but better.

But that would mean competing with partners , so it has its own issues.

Maybe by focusing on something like authentication , and offering Google
branded security , they could both achieve some lock-in in and not scare
partners ?

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iot_devs
My point of view is quite local, however I don't see any of the company I work
with having their data only on Google or AWS without a very clear way to get
it out.

Honestly I see IoT a lot like Machine Learning, everybody is talking about it,
everybody want to be part of the game, but there is not a clear solution.

Businesses have very specific use cases that require some, not trivial,
understanding of the technology, to be fulfilled in full. Even more to
actually use the data gathered.

For the foreseeable future I see the need to a quite senior figure to enable
IoT in businesses.

Once a senior figure has such data in clear, a way to mine value out of that
data I see at least unlikely that she is going to push all of that only on
google only to fetch then back once you need to do your visualization or
analysis. Maybe if you are completely sold to the google ecosystem, it may
make sense, but still...

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rogersach
Doesn't Microsoft also market an "IoT Core" of their own?

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joezydeco
Yes, Azure IoT Hub.

Works pretty well, and the Business Intelligence backend is pretty powerful.
Not sure what Google's version of that is here.

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karmicthreat
Taking a quick look at this it doesn't seem to offer much more over AWS.
Device management and remote access might be nice. But its been my experience
in B2B land that anything like this gets locked down by internal IT depts.

It might be a useful service for B2C devices though.

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euyyn
What does AWS offer for these use cases?

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karmicthreat
AWS has an IoT platform that offers roughly the same features. They also have
"Device Shadowing" which lets you store up some state that behaves as the
device when the connection is lost.
[https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/](https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/) also
looks interesting if you requires some edge computing services for your IoT
devices.

I don't actually use either of these platforms currently. I put together an in
house platform for the few features I need. Provisioning new device firmware
and updating are probably my biggest pains. Yocto is kind of awful as well,
but its the best that we have right now.

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Dwolb
What are the big pain points around provisioning new device firmware?

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karmicthreat
Giving the device I unique ID, registering it somewhere. Mount the image and
inject configuration information. Then you need to build some production
worker friendly appliances to actually program your devices.

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wiradikusuma
Honest question, I don't understand these "IoT servers". Aren't they just
standard servers that accept agreed protocol? E.g. HTTP or MQTT? Isn't this
something you can do yourself with $5 Digital Ocean?

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HeyLaughingBoy
Everything is something you can do yourself. The value is in not having to.

