Google Cloud has made an announcement recently that it is going to discontinue its IoT Core Services from 16th August, 2023, exactly after a year from now and it has urged its users to migrate from their service to an alternative service for the same.
“Google Cloud’s IoT Core Service will be discontinued on August 16, 2023 at which point your access to the IoT Core Device Manager APIs will no longer be available,” updated the Google Cloud’s IoT Core Product Team. “We recommend that you take action early to migrate from IoT Core to an alternative service. As an initial step, connect with your Google Cloud account manager if you have questions about your migration plans.”
Google Cloud’s rivals include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, who also offer similar service known as ‘IoT Core‘ (AWS) and ‘IoT Hub‘ (Microsoft).
What could be the reason for this decision?
The announcement was first brought to notice when it appeared at the top of the IoT Core webpage, followed by emails sent to the customers. This has made many customers question the company’s commitment to them and their decision to shut down the entire division, considering cloud infrastructure market is rapidly growing.
“Since launching IoT Core, it has become clear that our customers’ needs could be better served by our network of partners that specialize in IoT applications and services,” said the Google Cloud Spokesperson. “We have worked extensively to provide customers with migration options and solution alternatives, and are providing a year-long runway before IoT Core is discontinued.”
There are speculations being made on the sudden announcement by Google Cloud and some of them directs to the amounting loss that the cloud division has been facing for some time now. Reportedly the division gained an investment of $6 billion last month and yet faced losses of $858 million. However, its prior year the division made $4.6 billion and faced a loss of $591 million.
Besides, last July, Google Cloud had mentioned this in one of their blogs: “Customers will receive a minimum of one year’s notice of an impending change, during which time the feature will continue to operate without issue. Customers will have access to tools, docs, and other materials to migrate to newer versions with equivalent functionality and performance. We will also work with customers to help them reduce their usage to as close to zero as possible.”
Google’s motive behind launching IoT Core Service
Google launched its IoT Core Services in 2017, which offers a complete solution for collecting, processing, analyzing and visualizing IoT data in real time to support improved operational efficiency. Iot Core Services was launched to ease the task of aggregating data from physical objects and use it smartly for process automation and business intelligence.
According to the company, “IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows you to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of globally dispersed devices.”
