Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the most popular cloud platforms for building and hosting our own cloud applications. GCP provides services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning, among other things.

One of the new services of GCP is Google Cloud IoT Core (GCIC), which is still in beta at the time of writing.

GCIC is a fully managed service to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from globally dispersed devices.

One of the key differentiators of GCIC compared to other platforms is how the IoT stack is completed decoupled. GCIC only consists of device management and publishing data to a topic. The Pub/Sub service takes over the remaining communication, unlike in AWS or Azure, where the IoT has everything baked into one service.

A quick overview of how the GCIC is structured is illustrated in the following diagram:

On the left of the diagram, there are Devices that are out in the wilderness. These devices use the MQTTS protocol to connect and communicate with the GCIC. From there, the data can be sent to Cloud Functions or Cloud Dataflow and then this data can be indexed into any of Google's big data solutions services. Then, using a custom application or Google's own tools such as Data Studio, we can visualize the data.

We are going to follow a very similar approach for building our example as well.

For more information, navigate to this URL: https://cloud.google.com/iot-core/.