A survey of IoT cloud providers

Cloud Computing enables flexible resource provisions that has become hugely popular for many businesses to take advantage of responding quickly to new demands from customers. Many cloud providers follow recent trends in cloud application development, and offer federation capabilities at the platform level, thus creating Platform-as-a-Service solutions. There is a growing number of providers offering IoT-specific services, since cloud computing has the potential to satisfy IoT needs such as hiding data generation, processing and visualization tasks. While cloud provider offerings have been widely studied, IoT-specific features are still unexplored due to their recent appearance. In this paper we investigate such basic properties of IoT cloud providers by presenting a survey and a classification of them, which are the main contributions of this work. This work can be useful for application developers planning to exploit IoT capabilities of PaaS cloud providers. We also present the needs for an IoT device simulator based on the results of this survey, which can further ease IoT cloud system development in the future.