Top Cloud Service providers for IoT

We are living in the age of Internet of things, the network for connected devices are keep growing. One of the big challenge for these trillion of connected devices is data storage and data processing.

A few cloud service providers are transforming application development to meet the needs of the evolving IoT trend. They are building APIs, tools, and platforms that enable developers to build IoT applications that connect devices with the cloud.

Here are some promising providers who have built amazing platforms for IoT.

thethings.iO

Barcelona-based thethings.iO proclaims to be the “Amazon Web Services (AWS) for IoT companies”. The key differentiating factor is in its interoperability. thethings.iO is one the few platforms to expose both REST and CoAP APIs. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a protocol designed to be used in low-powered devices to allow them to communicate over the Internet. It is targeted at sensors, switches, valves, and actuators that are controlled remotely via standard Internet networks. thethings.iO uses CoAP to perform operations like activation, reading, writing and subscribing to sensors and channels.

Konekt

Chicago-based Konekt brings together a powerful union of cellular plans, cloud infrastructure, and APIs. Though most IoT developers prefer serial communications, WiFi, and Bluetooth, the protocols come with many constraints. Konekt is building upon GSM’s popularity and availability for machine-to-machine communication.

Xively

Xively is a division of LogMeIn, the company known for the remote access and collaboration products including Rescue, Boldchat, join.me, and Cubby. It is positioned as a PaaS built for IoT. Directory services, data services, and business services are the key components of Xively. The platform supports REST, WebSockets and MQTT protocols to connect devices to Xively Cloud Services. There are native SDKs for Android, Arduino, ARM mbed, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python languages.

PubNub

PubNub is a platform that provides real-time network service. Its vision is to enable developers to build real-time apps as quickly as creating a web page. The PubNub data stream network provides global cloud infrastructure and essential building blocks for real-time interactivity. As one of the early movers in this space, the company claims to process 3 million real-time messages per second originating from 100 million devices in a month. Powered by 14 data centers, the network delivers under a quarter of a second latency from any location in the world. One of the interesting features of PubNub is the web-based console to view and debug events.

SensorCloud

SensorCloud  is a sensor data storage, visualization, and remote management platform. The platform supports the lifecycle of IoT applications starting from data acquisition to visualization to monitoring and analysis. MathEngine is a service to analyze the data stored in SensorCloud. The platform is optimized for LORD MicroStrain’s sensors and gateways. Developers dealing with 3rd party sensors can ingest data via OpenData API or the provided CSV uploader.

Temboo

Temboo makes it incredibly easy for developers to connect sensors to the cloud. It is a cloud-based middleware to connect with hundreds of services exposed by storage providers, social media networks, and content providers. Dubbed as Choreos (short for choreography), Temboo generates code snippets to consume the service APIs in popular languages such as PHP, Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, and Ruby. It also has native SDKs for traditional languages and runtimes. Temboo partnered with Arduino to include its headers, libraries, and SDK in Arduino Yun, a microcontroller development board that has built-in WiFi. As IoT development goes mainstream, Temboo has the potential to become the default middleware for cloud APIs.

TempoIQ

TempoIQ has an API layer, storage service, and an analytics backend to perform historical data analysis. Developers can start monitoring sensor data with just three lines of code. TempoIQ’s strength is in its analytical pipeline that defines a sequence of operations that are applied to a stream of data originating from sensors, resulting in a new output stream of data points. Each pipeline operation contains a mathematical function such as max and min. Sophisticated analysis can be performed by chaining pipeline operations. TempoIQ built SDKs in popular languages for sensor management, data collection, storage, analysis, and alerting.