If you are doing anything that requires device communication, event messaging, or mobile integration, there are a number of services that provide cloud services, device libraries, and mobile SDKs to make that happen. We give some of these the “prototype-friendly” designation, but not because they are only applicable for hobby or smaller projects. These services put particular effort into making it really straightforward to get something working, are likely to support many of the devices used in hobby or prototype work, such as the Raspberry Pi or ESP32-based hardware, and might even have demos and howtos for solving common IoT use cases.

Some examples in this category are PubNub and Carriots.

PubNub

At the core of PubNub is an MQTT-based Publish/Subscribe service. In addition to allowing events to be streamed to and from devices, the PubNub backend also allows you to create custom functions that can be executed when specific events occur. This could be used to modify or route events in-flight, or even integrate with a REST API from another service, firing off a chunk of data whenever one of your devices publishes an event. Finally, to make it easier to get your IoT project communicating with mobile and web applications, they also provide SDKs for iOS, Android, Python and Javascript (among others).

Carriots

Carriots provides an MQTT-based Publish/Subscribe infrastructure for data collection and routing, as well as REST APIs for device status updates, administration and provisioning. Event listeners can be configured to trigger actions when specific event conditions occur, allowing you to integrate with other services. The administration interface also makes it easy to integrate directly with dashboard services like Initial State.