Internet of Things
(Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Underscoring how the internet of things is finally going mainstream in 2017, Google now has a new service for Google Cloud Platform that makes it easier for customers to upload large amounts of data from connected devices.

Announced just ahead of the company big Google I/O developer conference this week, Google Cloud IoT Core automates a lot of the manual work Google Cloud customers used to have to do a fair amount of configuration work on their own to move data from their connected devices to Google Cloud for processing, but this “fully managed” service now takes care of that, said Antony Passemard, product management lead for IoT at Google.

The service consists of two parts: a MQTT (message queue telemetry transport) bridge that ingests the data from whatever devices a customer has out in the wild and delivers them to Google’s Pub/Sub service. Once the data has been processed, the second new part — Device Manager — sends the data back to the connected device.

“Our target with Cloud IoT is the enterprise,” Passemard said. At one point it seemed like IoT would arrive on the consumer end, with connected homes and products like Google’s Nest thermostat, but much more progress is being made in industrial applications like manufacturing and transportation.

Unfortunately for Google, its public cloud rivals have been offering these kinds of services for a while. Amazon Web Services has offered managed IoT products for a few years now, and just last week Microsoft Azure added to its IoT services with Azure IoT Edge, which lets companies run IoT services directly on the connected devices rather than forcing them to reconnect to the cloud.

Google Cloud IoT Core is coming out in private beta as of Tuesday, and will be generally available by the end of the year.

Separately, Google also announced on Tuesday that its Cloud Spanner database, first showed off earlier this year, is now generally available. Database competition between new-guard cloud vendors and the old guard (Oracle) has been quite heated in 2017, and a wide-open Cloud Spanner service should improve Google’s story here.

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