Cloud for IoT Buyer’s Guide

To help you decide which of the Big Three cloud services – Google Cloud IoT Core, AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub – is best for your IoT project, we researched performance, pricing and other relevant information and compiled it into this handy Buyer’s Guide.

Written by Christopher Tozzi
6th December 2019

Deploying and managing IoT devices is hard. Public cloud vendors are trying to make it easier by offering cloud-based services that simplify the tasks of keeping track of all of the devices in a company’s IoT network, uploading and downloading data from them and processing that data.

Each of the Big Three clouds now include an IoT service for this purpose. On AWS, it’s called IoT Core. Google Cloud calls its service Cloud IoT Core. And Azure offers IoT Hub. Each cloud services provider also offers some complementary IoT-related services.

At a high level, these cloud for IoT platforms provide the same functionality. They let organizations create registries of IoT devices to help manage them and add them to an IoT network. The services also make it possible to collect data from IoT devices, process the data in the cloud and take action based on the results.

But when you dive into the details, it becomes clear that each cloud provider’s IoT service has its own quirks. To help businesses decide which cloud IoT service is best for their needs, we’ve prepared a Buyer’s Guide that summarizes performance, pricing and other relevant information for each of the Big Three public cloud’s IoT services.

Read on to learn about the factors that impact a choice in cloud for IoT services – such as scalability, network performance, availability and uptime, and pricing – as well as a downloadable grid that details how each of the Big Three cloud services providers address those factors.

We provide information on the number of devices supported for a single customer across all geographies and data centers; the number of supported cloud regions for IoT; communications protocols supported; cost structure of a basic tier of cloud services; total hours of cloud downtime; SLA uptime commitment; throughput speed guarantee for uplink/downlink per client; maximum concurrent connections allowed per account; maximum concurrent connections allowed per device; maximum outbound publish requests per second; encryption ciphers supported; intercloud jitter; and offline processing of data in edge gateway nodes.