Google on Wednesday moved Cloud IoT Core to public beta, adding new features and a basic price plan to the fully-managed service for maintaining IoT devices.
Google launched the service earlier this year with the support of NXP, targeting smart city and enterprise deployments like utilities and transportation. Customers can use the service in conjunction with other Google Cloud services for data analytics, such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Bigtable or BigQuery.
With the latest release, Cloud IoT Core customers can now bring their own device key, signed by their own Certificate Authority, and IoT Core verifies the key signature during the authentication process. This enables device manufacturers to provision their devices offline in bulk with their CA-issued certificate.
Additionally, customers can now connect existing devices to Cloud IoT Core using HTTP in addition to the standard MQTT protocol.
Lastly, for customers who need to retrieve the last state of an IoT device, Cloud IoT Core now maintains a logical representation of the physical device, including its last reported state and device properties. It provides APIs for applications to retrieve and update its state and properties even when the device isn’t connected.
For pricing, Google is introducing plans based on the volume of data exchanged with Cloud IoT Core, including a free tier for the first 250 MB per month. Customers can register as many devices as they want under the plans and only pay the devices are connected and exchnage data.