The Google IoT Core Alternatives to Go With After its Retirement
IoT Core, Google’s service for securely connecting and managing internet of things devices, is retiring on August 16, 2023. If you used this service to manage your IoT system, for example, a smart home, it’s high time to look for an alternative and prepare for migration.
Those who did not use Google IoT Core but considered it an option for their project are also hard set since they need to find a worthy replacement for the service. Fortunately, you have multiple options, and we’ll mention the top 2 solutions for your consideration. As a bonus, we’ll introduce you to a not direct competitor but still the actionable Google IoT Core alternative represented by an MQTT broker. Read on to find out more.
What are the alternatives to Google IoT Core?
The layman’s way to discover the solution to replace Google IoT Core is to refer to peer-to-peer review platforms such as G2. However, the information there is unified, i.e., it’s provided as a general overview based on some ratings and feedback. Besides, Google IoT Core has prepared a list of partner-led solutions built on Google Cloud that meet the needs of IoT customers.
We used another more profound way to evaluate alternatives to Google IoT Core based on our expertise in this field and ended up with the following list of top 2 solutions.
- Microsoft Azure IoT Hub is a platform as a service acting as a message hub to manage communication between all the connected devices and an IoT app. With Azure IoT Hub, you can collect data from millions of sensors and even create your own SDKs to manage IoT.
- AWS IoT Core is a cloud service to connect and manage devices and their interaction with each other and cloud apps. AWS IoT Core supports the MQTT, WebSockets, and HTTP 1.1 protocols to connect IoT devices to AWS.
All these options are Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) represented by big names: Microsoft, and AWS. On the one hand, they can offer scalability and trust. On the other hand, solutions offered by giant enterprise names tend to be overpriced and lack flexibility in setup and customization.
Therefore, it makes sense to pay attention to the Google IoT Core alternative that uses agile open standards and can offer more customization. The fastest MQTT broker globally, Pro Edition for Eclipse Mosquitto, can give you this.
Can an MQTT broker be a worthy Google IoT Core alternative?
As a refresher – MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol widely adopted for constrained devices and is the de-facto standard protocol in IoT. All the abovementioned Google IoT Core alternatives support MQTT to some degree but usually lack full compatibility with the official MQTT standard. Moreover, Google Cloud IoT Core acts as an MQTT broker to maintain communication between IoT devices in a secure cloud.
Put simply, paying for a PaaS, which Google IoT Core also is, makes you pay for features and functionalities you might never use but included out-of-the-box in the PaaS (and its price). So, what’s the point of draining money if you can use them more wisely by getting the same Service Level Agreement (SLA)? Pro Edition for Eclipse Mosquitto supports up to 99.99% SLA, maintaining the highest level of quality and responsibility. Let’s dive in to learn more about this MQTT broker as the Google IoT Core alternative.
Pro Edition for Eclipse Mosquitto as the Google IoT Core alternative
You’ve probably known or heard about Eclipse Mosquitto, an open-source lightweight MQTT broker. It is considered the world’s #1 to ensure quick and reliable data transmission between devices using MQTT protocol.
With Pro Edition for Eclipse Mosquitto, you get the open standards of Mosquitto compliant with both MQTT versions 3 and 5, complemented with increased availability, optimized performance, enhanced security, and other features. All this is available both with cloud and on-premise options. Moreover, the creator of Mosquitto, Roger Light, leads the development of Pro Edition for Mosquitto. This means that he can bring his unique lifelong experience into the product, and our clients get the most professional person in the area.
Pro Mosquitto will act as a reliable replacement for Google IoT Core. In the managed version, it becomes even an MQTT Platform-as-a-Service as well. Let’s discuss the benefits you can get with this MQTT broker.
Unmatched performance
The specific architecture of Pro Edition for Mosquitto offers high performance resulting in less RAM and CPU strain. It also allows more data to be sent on a single node, with the capability of maintaining up to 1 million connections. In addition, Pro Mosquitto offers MQTT high availability functionality, an MQTT broker node cluster system. It acts as a fault-proof group of at least three nodes that keep operations running smoothly should there be a node failure. If one node fails, another one automatically takes over all MQTT broker operations. In practice, this means that you can provide to your internal and/or external customers an extremely high availability of the MQTT service. Even in case of a node crash, failover is handled within seconds.
Enhanced reliability and security
As we’ve already mentioned, Pro Mosquitto supports up to 99.99% SLA maintaining only the highest level of quality and responsibility. The MQTT broker is completely secure with high-standard authentication and encryption protocols. In addition, you have the ability to change security settings easily and without a system reboot if required.
Professional support
For the open-source Eclipse Mosquitto, your support requests are mostly limited to questions on Stack Overflow or similar public platforms. With Pro Edition of Eclipse Mosquitto, you get different support levels and professional services for additional features, from an online forum to email support and beyond. The Enterprise subscription plan provides even more deep integration and involvement of the customer team in the client’s issues by having an opportunity to create tickets, monitor their status, and more.
Transparency and dedication
As a Google IoT alternative, Pro Mosquitto has the utmost transparency in pricing and product value, which some competitors do not offer upfront. Cedalo Pro Mosquitto prevents uncertainty by providing stability and an upstanding product that will be in the market for the long haul.
The evidence is in the numbers. Mosquitto has 6.7K GitHub stars and 500+ millions of Docker pulls, including nearly 12 million monthly, making it the frontman in the MQTT broker product ecosystem.
Scalability
Above, we mentioned that for an MQTT broker, even the best one in the world, it is not easy to compete with Google IoT core and other PaaSes in terms of scalability. Nevertheless, there are customers using 1,000,000 clients and more on a Pro Edition for Mosquitto.
A single node of Pro Mosquitto can support up to 250 Mbit/s of total traffic. The number of concurrent clients depends heavily on the message size, publication frequency, and how many subscribers will receive a published message.
Beyond that, Cedalo is working in customer-specific set-ups also with several active nodes in a cluster to scale beyond single-node capacity.
Actionable features provided by Pro Mosquitto
Pro Mosquitto integrates seamlessly with other services and has an intuitive and easy-to-follow interface. The Management Center, a central point for managing your Mosquitto instances & clusters, can easily define users, arrange them into user groups, and set accessibility controls (Role-Based Access Controls or RBAC). Other features available with Pro Edition for Mosquitto include Dashboarding, a set of REST APIs, Cloud Backup, Stream Processing, Terminal view, and many others.
If you’re ready to gain all these benefits and many others, try Pro Edition of Eclipse Mosquitto with its 14-day free trial.
How to migrate from Google IoT Core to Pro Mosquitto?
Most of you will agree that Pro Mosquitto is a worthy replacement for Google IoT Core. The next step will be, of course, to migrate from one service to another. We could say that it’s a piece of cake, and you can do this with a glimpse of an eye. However, we must admit that migration can be both smooth and challenging, depending on your goals and purposes. The biggest stumbling block would be authentication since it’s very different on IoT Core.
So, what are the first steps to start the migration journey? To start the migration journey today, check out the 14-day free trial and submit a contact form. After that, our Solution Engineer will get in touch with you and be able to prepare a custom offer to make sure the migration happens as smoothly as possible.
About the author
Zakhar is a content manager at Coupler.io, tasked with the important role of ensuring that readers love and enjoy the content created by the company. With over 5 years of experience as a skilled writer in the SaaS industry, Zakhar can craft texts that resonate with the audience's queries.
Despite not being a developer, Zakhar sees this as an advantage in effectively explaining complex technical concepts to the readers using simple and accessible language. Zakhar's content expertise spans various areas, such as working with REST APIs, data automation, reporting and analytics, MQTT, email testing, and more.
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