Google: Building the Smart Space

Urban innovation is particularly necessary today, for enhanced business operations and improved quality of life, as the Internet of Things spearheads a new wave of experimentation. While technology is heavily advancing at every sector around us, we are entering the era of smart cities, in which information and communication technologies capture extraordinary amounts of data and deploy their findings, often in real-time, to transform economic and administrative practices. Major urban challenges such as mobility, efficient transport, cost of living, use of natural resources and government efficiency are also to be improved. The technology giant Google is also adding up to this space for accelerating the innovation and advancements. Google is on the front line to help combat urban problems with its core skill: technology.

The company’s core focus is to ensure that the urban population gets a more equitable, affordable, and prosperous future. IoT Core by Google is a fully managed service that enables an organization to connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of geographically scattered devices safely and straightforwardly. The way the company is reshaping the smart city with connected devices all around. When used in conjunction with other Google Cloud services and smart devices, IoT Core offers a complete solution for gathering, processing, analyzing, and displaying IoT data in real-time to aid operational efficiency. IoT Core can collect scattered device data into a single worldwide system that interfaces smoothly with Google Cloud data analytics services, owing to Cloud Pub/Sub beneath. To assist increase operational efficiency, predict problems, and construct complex models that better characterize and manage an organization, use IoT data stream for sophisticated analytics, visualizations, machine learning, and more from Google IoT.

Connect a few or millions of internationally scattered devices securely using protocol endpoints that leverage intelligent load balancing and horizontal scalability to ensure seamless data input in any situation. IoT Core supports the industry-standard MQTT and HTTP protocols, allowing to keep using the existing devices with only minor firmware updates. IoT Core is built on Google’s serverless architecture, which expands dynamically in reaction to real-time changes and follows industry-standard security measures to safeguard a company’s data. IoT Core has designed a safe, intelligent, and responsive IoT data pipeline that incorporates device data into daily operations. With IoT Core, a firm can easily publish its device updates. From a single pane of glass, controlling the whole IoT data network is what Google IoT does. IoT Core works with devices from prominent hardware vendors right out of the box. A firm can effectively cut capital expenditures and maintenance expenses on its IoT projects with a pay-as-you-go service.

Individual devices may be set up and controlled securely in a coarse-grained manner using the device manager of Google IoT; administration can be done via a console or programmatically. The device manager creates a device’s identification and offers a way for verifying it when it connects. It also keeps track of each device’s logical setup and may be used to control it remotely from the cloud. The protocol bridge of Google IoT offers connection endpoints for protocols with automated load balancing for all device connections. The protocol bridge natively supports secure connections over industry-standard protocols such as MQTT and HTTP. All device telemetry is published to Cloud Pub/Sub by the protocol bridge, which downstream analytic systems may subsequently consume.

Asymmetric key authentication by Google IoT over TLS 1.2 can enable end-to-end security; CA-signed certificates can be used to validate device ownership. Full-stack protection may be provided by devices that meet the Cloud IoT Core security standards. It is easy to connect all devices and gateways to Google Cloud using standard protocols like MQTT and HTTP and manage them as a unified global system using the protocol endpoints. The service is powered by Cloud Pub/Sub, which keeps data for seven days.

Through Googe IoT, it is easy to integrate with Google Big data analytics and machine learning services like Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, ML, Google Data Studio, or partner BI tools to use downstream analytic systems. The service is serverless, which means it doesn’t require any software installation upfront. Using Google Cloud Platform’s horizontal scalability, it scales fast and without constraints. Control user access to devices and data by assigning IAM roles to device registries. To handle the registration, deployment, and operation of devices at scale, use REST APIs. Also, even when the devices are not connected, utilize the APIs to get and change device attributes and status.

Sending commands or configuration directives to Cloud IoT Core-connected devices is no more a difficult task with the Google IoT platform. Commands are one-time directives issued to devices that are transmitted quickly and often. When utilizing MQTT, configurations are persistent instructions that are sent to all subscribing devices, including those added later. Furthermore, Google allows resource-constrained devices to operate offline with the help of a gateway. A gateway can do things like communicating with Cloud IoT Core, connect to the internet, and authenticate credentials on behalf of a device. Create dashboards using Stackdriver Monitoring to display statistics such as the total number of active devices in a registry through Google IoT. Set up notifications depending on metric thresholds, such as when devices in a registry exceed a pre-determined billable data limit. In Stackdriver Logging, one may see connection and error logs as well as audit logs. Configure user-defined metrics to learn more about how many devices submitted data to a particular Cloud Pub/Sub topic.

Oden Technologies is using the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve the factories of today. The giant network of “things” (including people) connected via the internet has the potential to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and improve safety. Oden is leading IoT innovation in manufacturing by combining wireless connectivity, big data, and cloud computing. Recently, Oden Technologies moved to the Google Cloud Platform to cut the cost and complexity of its intelligent factory cloud platform for manufacturing analytics. This resulted in profitability and decreased waste with real-time data analysis. It also cuts the number of VM instances to manage almost in half, freeing resources and reducing data storage and analytics costs by 30 percent.

Recently, Smart Parking has transformed into a data-intelligence solutions firm with an IoT platform to capitalize on intelligent city advancements using Google Cloud Platform. This installation and operational support for smart parking/smart city IoT were cut in half. In under four months, they constructed a Smart Cloud IoT platform across the organization, democratized data access, and used it.

Businesses now want a quick and responsive method of communicating with and controlling fleets of IoT devices in the field. Recently, Google IoT unveiled new device commands feature for their Cloud IoT Core managed service, which provides temporary communications between the cloud and IoT devices at high-frequency, low-latency, and fleeting rates. Device commands enable numerous new IoT use cases by providing a real-time alternative to Cloud IoT Core device configs. Device commands are now broadly accessible in IoT Core for all Google Cloud Platform users as of today. Thus, Google’s IoT technical tools are exceptional, and the packaging of their IoT solutions is distinct enough from those of competitors, providing them the best future ahead.