On August 16, 2022, Google dropped the bomb: The company shut down the cloud offering IoT Core completely. Customers who have connected thousands of devices to the Google Cloud now have to look for an alternative. They are rightly wondering how to avoid going from bad to worse.
The main problem with cloud offerings such as IoT Core, but also AWS IoT Core and Azure IoT, is that they mostly connect the customer’s physical devices and use proprietary SDKs in the device. In the case of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), starting in August 2023, devices will no longer be able to connect to the cloud unless customers take action. This means that data transmission no longer takes place. A disaster for all Google Cloud customers who have sold their own customers devices that will no longer work.
The only way to get out of this mess and position yourself for the future is to rely on open standards. The success of the Internet is based on such standards as Ethernet, TCP/IP, TLS, DNS and various application protocols such as HTTP, FTP and web sockets. It is therefore surprising and irresponsible that companies install proprietary communication software in their devices for IoT applications of all things.
Specifically, manufacturers such as AWS and Microsoft offer their edge runtime environments such as IoT Edge and AWS Greengrass so that customers can build them into the hardware and thus directly into the value chain. Under the guise of open standards such as MQTT, providers suggest that there is no lock-in effect. However, the reality couldn’t be further from this: AWS, Microsoft and Google use a proprietary, non-compatible MQTT version based on the old and outdated MQTT 3 standard, which is only compatible with their own clouds and not the standard feature set and the protocol guarantees. Mind you: MQTT 5 has existed since January 2018. Of course, the clouds are not compatible with each other when it comes to data transport, and the device management functions of the IoT products are 100% proprietary.
With the death of GCP IoT Core, some voices are now being raised that claim: “This would not have happened with AWS and Azure!”. A similar statement could probably have been heard from Google some time ago, as no one could have imagined any of the big three cloud players throwing in the towel. Unfortunately, cloud providers tend to keep a low profile when it comes to deprecations. Microsoft Azure regularly retires services, APIs, and SDKs, and has in return own Twitter account. The buried offerings include Device SDKs, i.e. exactly the software that is built into the value chain of their customers. AWS is keeping a low profile on deprecations. However, industry insider Corey Quinn reports regularly on his blog, Last Week on AWS. Among other things, Amazon will only officially supply version 1 of AWS Greengrass, which is built into many IoT devices, with software updates until 2023.
Software on devices must be based on open standards and open source software. If a provider then shuts down a service like IoT Core, you would change the cloud endpoint and as a device manufacturer you would not be dependent on the decisions of individual cloud product teams. For MQTT, there are open source brokers such as Eclipse Mosquitto, HiveMQ or EMQX, which is financed and manufactured in China. For devices, Eclipse Paho offers the standard implementations for MQTT. With a few contortions, these can be designed to be compatible with the IoT offerings from AWS and Azure (and also GCP), even if not all features can be used. There is a big gap in the market for open standards for device management. Unfortunately, protocols like LWM2M have not caught on, and open source applications are highly fragmented.
Get out of the addiction
Driven by the news of the death of GCP IoT Core, numerous development departments will discuss the topics of vendor lock-in and proprietary SDKs extremely critically. The important thing now is not to go from bad to worse. The dependency on cloud services, which enters the value chain of devices, becomes a business risk. Any decision against open standards like MQTT will have long-term effects on the competitiveness of companies.
Commercial guarantees beyond lip service that they will support certain proprietary connectivity products for long periods of time are usually not given by official cloud providers. That doesn’t mean that cloud products should be demonized – quite the opposite! Elementary components such as compute, network or storage, but also technologies such as hosted Kubernetes bring a clear competitive advantage.
When it comes to device connectivity, the death of GCP IoT Core shows how risky proprietary offerings are. If Google now throws in the towel, which manufacturers will follow in the next few years? And which customers want to make their own business dependent on it? Only open standards are the way forward.
