Which Cloud Platform Is Ideal to Host IoT Apps?

IoT is becoming a point of discussion both in and outside of the working environment. It’s an idea that just can affect how we live in addition to how we work. Be that as it may, what precisely is the “Internet of Things” and what effect is it going to have on you, if any?

There is a great deal of complexity around IoT, however, and I need to adhere to the nuts and bolts. Loads of discussion related to technology and policies are going to happen before it reaches a stage of standardization.

How about we begin with why IoT is picking up like a storm:

• Broadband Internet turned out to be more generally accessible.
• Expense of connectivity is diminishing,
• More gadgets are being made with Wi-Fi abilities and sensors incorporated with them.
• Innovation expenses are going down, and cell phone entrance is soaring.

Impact: Individuals vs. Organization

With IoT, you can connect anything and everything — but why do you want to connect everything. How helpful will it be as an individual when, upon starting your car from the office, your home AC gets switched on to cool your house even before you reach home?

From an organizational perspective, what if your office products were ordered automatically before they run out?

Why IoT Needs the Cloud

Gartner says by 2020, more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things. The impact of IoT on consumers’ lives and corporate business models is rapidly increasing as the cost of “instrumenting” physical things with sensors and connecting them to other things — devices, systems, and people — continues to drop.

For IoT to work, you need a centralized system to get connected, and the cloud became that superpower for IoT innovations. The picture below defines the architecture of IoT and clearly shows how cloud platforms take center stage in all connected devices.

Which Cloud Platforms can Support IoT?

Many platforms have made the move to support IoT innovations.

IBM Softlayer

IBM announced a $3 billion investment in a new business unit that the company hopes will position it to succeed in IoT. This investment, by some ways of counting, is even larger. This $3 billion, over four years, will be spent to:

• Harmonize existing strategic activities from the Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities brands, which have had an Internet of Things element for a decade or more;
• Put all those SoftLayer data centers to work in crunching huge volumes of data streaming in from billions of connected devices (wind turbines, jet engines, building climate monitoring systems, pacemakers, smartphones and — of course — refrigerators);
• Promote IBM’s existing take on Platform as a Service (PaaS), Bluemix, to encourage application developers to build their applications on IBM hardware, using IBM software and IBM services;
• Ultimately (we must, surely, assume) exploit IBM’s ongoing investment in Watson. No longer a toy designed to show off on Jeopardy, Watson is evolving into a powerful, compelling, and accessible analytics tool. It’s still too complex to deploy without significant investment of IBM’s own time and know-how, but that’s less true than it was.

Amazon Web Services

AWS IoT is a platform that enables you to connect devices to AWS Services and other devices, secure data and interactions, process and act upon device data, and enable applications to interact with devices even when they are offline. AWS Support IoT with features like

• Supports HTTP, WebSockets, and MQTT.
• Rules Engine can route messages to AWS endpoints including AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service with built-in Kibana integration.
• Create a persistent, virtual version, or “shadow,” of each device that includes the device’s latest state.

Digital Ocean

DigitalOcean may be much younger and smaller than the industry giants with deep pockets, but they're still giving the more established brands a run for their money. In fewer than five years, this New York-based startup has become among the most popular cloud hosting company among developers. Digital Ocean supports IoT Features like How to setup a Mosquitto MQTT Server and receive data from OwnTracks.

Microsoft Azure Cloud

The Azure IoT Suite is an integrated offering that takes advantage of all the relevant Azure capabilities to connect devices and other assets (i.e. “things”), capture the diverse and voluminous data they generate, integrate and orchestrate the flow of that data, and manage, analyze, and present it as usable information to the people who need it to make better decisions as well as intelligently automate operations. The offering, while customizable to fit the unique needs of organizations, is focused on speeding deployment of common scenarios we see across many industries, such as remote monitoring, asset management, and predictive maintenance while providing the ability to grow and scale solutions to millions of “things.” A few features include:

• Easily integrate Azure  Suite with your systems and applications, including Salesforce, SAP, Oracle Database, and Microsoft Dynamics.
• Azure  Suite packages together Azure services with preconfigured solutions..
• Supports HTTP, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT).
• Gateway SDK.

Google Cloud

Google built two products, which it debuted at the 2015 I/O developer conference, for three reasons:

1. Help device makers build for IoT.
2. Create open ecosystems.
3. Create opportunity for services.

To address the gateway component, Google has partnered with companies like Intel to better connect devices to the Google Cloud Platform. With Google Cloud:

• Take advantage of Google’s heritage of web-scale processing, analytics, and machine intelligence.
• Utilizes Google’s global fiber network (70 points of presence across 33 countries) for ultra-low latency.

Every platform has something better to offer in terms of IoT. So, if you choose one platform you will loose other platform’s functionality and features. So best way to go forward is to go ahead with multicloud approach. You can read more about Multicloud and its architecture here.