Google Unfurls IoT Cloud Platform

For several years now, Google has been employing a variety of technologies to drive Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as the Nest thermostat. This week, Google announced it is now making those technologies available as a cloud service that organizations can employ to host their own applications.

Indranil Chakraborty, head of Google cloud product management, says Google Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed cloud service that employs the MQTT protocol to connect devices to a cloud service that provides access to Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine services as well as third-party business intelligence and analytics applications from Google partners such as Looker, Qlik, Tableau and Zoomdata.

The managed Google Cloud IoT Core service, says Chakraborty, is based on a serverless computing framework that enables applications deployed on the platform to dynamically scale up and down as needed in a way that Chakraborty says is completely automated.

“We can use that framework to support millions of devices,” says Chakraborty.

While those devices can run any operating system, Chakraborty says Google Cloud IoT Core can also be employed to automatically update any device running the Google Android operating system. Chakraborty also notes that Google expects organizations to use open source TensorFlow software it developed to extend machine learning algorithms all the way down to the IoT gateway level.

While Google might be a distant third when it comes to public clouds today, the rise of IoT applications may very well represent a new greenfield opportunity for Google to narrow that gap considerably.