Google LLC announced on Wednesday that it’s bringing its new Cloud IoT Core service into public beta testing following a limited launch last May.

Google Cloud IoT Core is described as a fully managed service available on the Google Cloud Platform. It’s designed to securely connect and manage “internet of things” devices at scale.

The central component of Cloud IoT Core is a management tool that automates many of the chores involved in maintaining remote hardware. Users can quickly set up an authentication mechanism to verify device connections, roll out configuration changes and apply firmware updates. Cloud IoT Core also provides the ability to collect data over the widely supported MQTT protocol.

Cloud IoT Core can also be used with the company’s broader Google Cloud IoT service, allowing customers to ingest all of their internet of things data and connect it with analytics services such as Google’s Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery and Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

In today’s blog post, Google said it’s launching Cloud IoT Core into public beta for anyone to try out, after receiving feedback from early adopters in the transportation, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and ride-hailing industries.

Google has also added some interesting new features to the service, including the ability to verify ownership of device keys. This means device manufacturers can provision their internet of things devices offline in bulk with their own Certificate Authority-issued certificates.

The new update also adds compatibility with the HTTP internet protocol, so customers can now choose to connect their devices using this or the standard MQTT protocol. Last, Google has added something called “logical device representation,” which allows application programming interfaces to retrieve and update device properties and states even when they’re not connected to the internet.

Diagram showing how Cloud IoT Core fits into Google’s cloud ecosystem

Google said in its blog post that early adopters have already managed to build some innovative internet of things platforms using the service. For example, transportation and logistics companies are using Cloud IoT Core to ensure their vehicles are in the right places at the right time, while utilities firms use it to better monitor, analyze and predict consumer’s energy usage.

Google also announced pricing details for the new service, which is based on the volume of data exchanged. Customers can register an unlimited number of devices and will only pay when they actually use the service. The first 250 megabytes is free, then customers will be charged at a rate of $0.0045 per megabyte for up to 250GB of data exchanged per month. For those who use more than 5 terabytes of data per month, they’ll be charged at a cheaper rate of $0.00045 per MB.

Images: Geralt/Pixabay, Google