Google Cloud IoT Core

Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows end-users to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of global devices. Cloud IoT Core, combined with other services on IoT platforms which in turn provides a complete solution for collecting, processing, analyzing, and visualizing IoT data in real-time.

Google's IoT architecture is categorized into four stages: data gathering, data ingestion, data processing, and data analysis.

• Data Gathering: The first stage, data gathering, occurs at the sensors and devices. Sensors gather data from outside and send it to the cloud, either directly or through an intermediary device using a gateway. A device is usually responsible to prepare the data for transmission to the cloud. Depending on the network, preparation can include cleaning, preprocessing, analysis, and even machine learning inference.
• Data Ingestion and Processing: This is a fully managed solution for ingesting and processing IoT data. Usually, Cloud IoT Core devices are securely connected to the cloud. Cloud Pub/Sub receives messages from devices and publishes them for subscribers to read.
• Data Analytics: Data analysis can be done on the Edge or on the cloud. Google's Cloud IoT Core is fully integrated with IoT data. It includes visualizing and predicting results to generate actionable outcomes.

Features of Google Cloud IoT Core

• Single Global System: It can connect all devices and gateways to Google Cloud using protocols like MQTT and HTTP and these are managed as a single global system.

• Out-of-box Data Insights: Downstream analytics integrate with Big data analytics and ML services such as Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable for real-time analytics during the dataflow through a custom pipeline.

• Fully Managed and Scalable: The service is fully serverless and doesn’t require software installation. It scales instantly without limits.

• Role-level Access Control: IAM protocols can be applied to device registries to control user access to devices and data.

• End-to-end Security: Cloud IoT Core uses asymmetric key authentication. 

Security Features in Cloud IoT Core

Security is an important aspect while deploying and managing an IoT network. Cloud IoT Core has several security features to protect the network of IoT Core which are all connected through sensors and devices.

• All Devices are authenticated individually. So if there is an attack it will not affect the whole system.
• While creating a device, the security keys at the end of the device register must contain RS256 and RSA256_X509, and ES256 and ES256_X509 keys.
• The connection to the cloud is a TLS 1.2 connection.