The final category is the IoT services that live within large scale cloud infrastructures, such as Amazon AWS IoT, Google Cloud IoT, and Microsoft Azure IoT Suite. These services all provide complete MQTT and REST APIs, and have the benefit of being tightly integrated with the storage and compute products that are at the core of each company’s respective cloud offering.

For developers that regularly work with other cloud products provided by these platforms, their IoT cloud APIs might be a familiar and obvious fit, with benefits that include sophisticated deployment tools and robust security models.

On the other hand, a first introduction to these services can be a bit intimidating, as you soon find yourself generating X.509 certificates to authenticate your devices and navigating the nomenclature and white papers that come with the territory.

Trade-offs to consider:

Ease of getting started -vs- applicability for larger deployment and customization
Off the shelf solutions or build your own
Quality of documentation, examples, howtos, and community support
Platform longevity, vendor reputation & business model
End-to-end platform or mix and match multiple services
Open source, data ownership
Dependency lock-in and migration options
Costs to entry and scaling