Benefits
Using the Internet of Things (IoT) to operate device data and improve efficiency has become an industry trend. However, enterprises often face obstacles when building their own IoT systems. Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform offers significant advantages over self-built MQTT clusters and servers, helping solve problems that can hinder enterprise IoT development.
Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform has stopped accepting new subscriptions and further development due to a product strategy adjustment. If you have relevant requirements, we recommend using Link Living as an alternative product.
This topic compares Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform with a self-built MQTT cluster in terms of capabilities and costs. The comparison shows that IoT Platform is more powerful and cost-effective.
More powerful capabilities
The following table compares the capabilities of Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform and a self-built MQTT cluster.
Item | Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform | Self-built MQTT cluster |
Device connection | Provides device-side software development kits (SDKs) to help you connect devices to the cloud quickly and efficiently. It supports global device connection from heterogeneous networks, multiple environments, and with multiple protocols. The platform scales automatically to handle hundreds of millions of devices. It ensures stable connections and processes device messages in less than 50 ms. | Building the infrastructure requires coordination between embedded and cloud developers. This process involves a large workload and has low efficiency. The architecture struggles to support millions of devices. High concurrency makes it difficult to ensure platform stability. Many devices connecting and disconnecting can cause the platform to crash. |
Extensibility | Offers multiple billing methods, such as pay-as-you-go and subscription. You can scale out seamlessly as your business grows. | Requires an upfront investment in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources. As your business grows, you must continuously scale out. |
Concurrency | Supports millions of concurrent connections with a horizontally scalable architecture. The core message processing system uses a stateless architecture with no single point of failure. Failed message transmissions are automatically retried. | The architecture struggles to support tens of thousands of messages. Concurrent upstream and downstream messages can severely impact the system. It cannot perform peak-load shifting, which affects normal business operations during peak hours. |
Security | Complies with MLPS 2.0 (Level 3) and provides multiple layers of protection to ensure device data security.
| You must develop and deploy additional security measures. Securing device data is a major challenge. A lack of security professionals and awareness means security issues cannot be resolved promptly, which can lead to significant business impact. |
Availability | The platform is decentralized with no single point of failure and is supported by multiple data centers. Guarantees service availability of over 99.95%, with compensation for failures to meet this standard. Faults are discovered within 1 minute, located within 5 minutes, and resolved within 30 minutes. | If a crash occurs during migration, you must discover and resolve it yourself before you can complete the migration. The service is interrupted during migration, so availability cannot be guaranteed. There are no clear quantitative standards for availability. When problems occur, the technical and O&M teams must investigate. The resolution time is not guaranteed, and you must bear any resulting losses. |
Ease of use | The platform is ready to use after activation. It provides a console, device SDKs, and cloud-side SDKs that work together. It features one-stop device management, real-time monitoring, and seamless integration with other Alibaba Cloud products. This lets you build complex IoT applications with flexibility and ease. The platform supports Thing Specification Language models, so you do not need to define custom data formats. This simplifies data structuring for data analytics and visualization. Comprehensive monitoring and alert configurations help you promptly detect platform and business anomalies. Open data and APIs establish a data link from devices, through the platform, to your business servers. | You must purchase servers and build a distributed architecture with load balancing. Developing a complete IoT system for connection, computing, and storage requires significant human and material resources. Without a console, you must build both the frontend and backend. Implementing features such as device connection status, lifecycle management, and remote O&M is complex. |
Global device deployment | The platform is available in 8 regions worldwide, located in Asia, Europe, and North America. Devices can connect to the nearest region globally. It uses Alibaba Cloud's domain name acceleration to reduce cross-border communication latency. | Deployment outside China is expensive and difficult to maintain. Device access latency is high, and you must also consider security and compliance issues. |
Synchronous call | Supports server-side synchronous calls to device services using revert-RPC (RRPC). | Not supported. |
Data parsing | Supports cloud-hosted scripts for custom protocol parsing. | Not supported. Must be handled by the business server. |
Data forwarding | Supports data forwarding to nearly 10 other cloud products through rules engine configurations. | Not supported. Requires development effort. |
Device shadow | Supports cache status synchronization between devices and the platform. | |
OTA update | Supports over-the-air (OTA) update methods for devices based on multiple dimensions. | |
Log service | Supports log queries and massive log storage. | |
Real-time monitoring | Supports real-time O&M monitoring charts, threshold-based alerts, and event-based alerts. |
Lower costs
Assume an enterprise has 10,000 devices. Each device is online for 16 hours a day and sends one message every 5 minutes on average. The size of a single message is between 512 B and 1 KB. The following table compares the costs of using a self-built MQTT cluster and Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform.
The prices of the following products are subject to change. For the latest pricing, see the product purchase page.
Item | Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform | Self-built MQTT cluster (based on Alibaba Cloud ECS) |
Cloud resource fees | Purchase a medium standard instance with a capacity for 10,000 concurrent online devices, 100 Transactions Per Second (TPS) for upstream and downstream messages, 100 TPS for the rules engine, and the minimum data storage specification. Total cost: CNY 16,080/year. For the purchase page, see IoT Platform Instance Purchase Page. |
Total cost: CNY 9,851/year. |
Labor costs | None. | Assume one platform R&D and O&M engineer has a monthly salary of CNY 8,000. If this work takes up 20% of the engineer's time, the labor cost is CNY 8,000 × 12 × 20% = CNY 19,200/year. This does not include bonuses or social insurance costs. |
Total | CNY 16,080/year. | CNY 29,051/year. |