Google Cloud IoT is the IoT platform proposed by Google to manage business insights from your global device network. The key components of GCP related to the I-IoT are as follows:
- Cloud IoT Core: The device hub to receive data and manage devices
- Cloud Pub/Sub: A publisher/subscriber service to consume data
- Cloud Dataflow or Cloud Functions: These are used to process data for conversion, digital twins, and diagnosis
- Cloud Bigtable: This is used for data storage
There are also some more general-purpose services:
- Cloud Machine Learning (ML)
- Cloud BigQuery
- Cloud Storage
From an Edge perspective, Google is quite agnostic. However, they have recently declared that Android will be the platform that is used to develop IoT. The following diagram shows the basic flow diagram implemented by the GCP IoT:
Google IoT Core supports Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and HTTPS. It is the central hub for connecting remote devices and uses Google Pub/Sub for data routing. With Cloud Dataflow, a Google service that allows you to process stream analytics, and Cloud Functions, Google's serverless platform, we can process data and perform actions to store time-series or object data. Google's Bigtable can be used to store time-series and events, while Cloud Storage can be used to store objects. Cloud BigQuery and Cloud ML are useful for batch analytics processing and we can develop a simple visualization application using Google Data Studio. In the following simple exercise, we will learn how to connect a device with the Google Edge SDK, how to process data with Google Functions and Google Dataflow, and how to store time-series in Google Bigtable.