Amazon, Google and Microsoft Solutions for IoT: Architectures and a Performance Comparison

Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect the real world made up of devices, sensors and actuators to the virtual world of Internet in order to interconnect devices with each other generating information from the gathered data. Devices, in general, have limited computational power and limited storage capacity. Cloud Computing (CC) has virtually unlimited capacity in terms of storage and computing power, and is based on sharing resources. Therefore, the integration between IoT and CC seems to be one of the most promising solutions. In fact, many of the biggest companies that offer Cloud Services are focusing on the IoT world to offer services also in this direction to their users. In this paper we compare the three main Cloud Platforms (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure) regarding to the services made available for the IoT. After describing the typical architecture of an IoT application, we map the Cloud-IoT Platforms services with this architecture analyzing the key points for each platform. At the same time, in order to conduct a comparative analysis of performance, we focus on a service made available by all platforms (MQTT middleware) building the reference scenarios and the metrics to be taken into account. Finally, we provide an overview of platform costs based on different loads. The aim is not to declare a winner, but to provide a useful tool to developers to make an informed choice of a platform depending on the use case.