IoT cloud platforms are specialized cloud-based private or public infrastructure, which in itself is an extensive topic. We will focus on the very basics of IoT cloud platforms in this chapter. The IoT cloud platforms are carefully designed for use by edge devices. The IoT platforms usually provide the following fundamental services:

• Web-based administrative console for managing the connection details of edge devices. Device-specific connection points are also known as channels, while there are also generalized messaging queues to which any device can post data.
• Cloud-based backend databases/stores/lakes for storing the incoming device data.
• Cloud-based analytics services to operate upon the incoming data (also known as stream analytics) and transform the data into more meaningful desirable forms.
• To cap it all, some advanced reporting functionality is also provided by the cloud platforms.

There are many IoT cloud platform providers in the market, such as the following, to name a few. We must choose depending on the situation and the project:

• Azure IoT Hub/Event Hub from Microsoft
• AWS IoT from Amazon
• Google IoT
• IBM BlueMix IoT
• IBM Watson IoT
• ThingSpeak IoT
• Thingworx IoT
• Particle IoT
• Dweet IoT

In this chapter, we will use an IoT cloud platform known as ThingSpeak. The ThingSpeak platform has been chosen for ease of use with Arduino, easy availability of many online resources, and it also does not require a credit card for free registration and academic use.

The following diagram shows the basic general steps involved in IoT prototyping:

As shown earlier, the first step in IoT prototyping is to choose and register on a preferred IoT cloud platform. Once the basic registration has been completed, the next step is to set up the edge devices in the IoT cloud. For setting up a device in the IoT cloud, you will usually find a dashboard after you log in to your IoT cloud account. From this dashboard, there will be options to set up the details of the edge devices from which data will be transmitted.

The final part of the IoT prototyping process consists of two basic steps: building the actual edge device and then writing a program/sketch to be embedded in the edge device.

In the following sections, we will learn how to configure an IoT cloud and build the edge device using the Arduino board with the ThingSpeak IoT cloud platform via the ESP8266-01 Wi-Fi chip.