Key concepts
To understand ClearBlade IoT Core, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
Internet of Things (IoT)
A collective term for the physical objects connected to the internet (directly or indirectly) that can exchange data without user involvement.
A Thing in the Internet of Things. It is a processing unit capable of connecting to the internet and exchanging data with the cloud. Devices are often called smart devices or connected devices. They communicate two types of data: telemetry and state.
Telemetry
All event data (for example, measurements about the environment) sent from devices to the cloud. Telemetry data sent from a device to the cloud is called device telemetry event data. You can use Google Cloud Big Data Solutions to analyze telemetry data.
An arbitrary, user-defined blob of data that describes the device's current status. Device state data can be structured or unstructured. It flows only in the device-to-cloud direction.
An arbitrary, user-defined blob of data used to modify a device's settings. Configuration data can be structured or unstructured. It flows only in the cloud-to-device direction.
A container of devices with shared properties. You register a device with a service (like ClearBlade IoT Core) so that you can manage it (see the next item in this list).
Device manager
The service you use to monitor device health and activity, update device configurations, and manage credentials and authentication.
An industry-standard IoT protocol (Message Queue Telemetry Transport). MQTT is a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging protocol.
Components
The main components of ClearBlade IoT Core are the device manager and the protocol bridges:
A device manager for registering devices with the service, so you can then monitor and configure them
Two protocol bridges (MQTT and HTTP) that devices can use to connect to the Google Cloud Platform
Device telemetry data is forwarded to a Google Cloud Pub/Sub topic, which can then be used to trigger Google Cloud Functions. You can also perform streaming analysis with Google Cloud Dataflow or custom analysis with your subscribers.
The following diagram summarizes the service components and the flow of data:
Quotas and limits
ClearBlade IoT Core enforces quotas and limits on a per-project basis.