What is IoT Platform?
Alibaba Cloud IoT Platform is an all-in-one platform that provides device connectivity and management, secure data communication, message subscription, data forwarding, and various data services, including storage, analytics, filtering, parsing, and integration. The platform connects to many devices to collect data and provides cloud APIs that your server can call using a cloud SDK. This lets you remotely control devices by sending commands.
Prerequisites
Before you read this topic, you should understand the following concepts:
Get started with IoT Platform
Video: A quick introduction to Alibaba Cloud IoT services.
I am a developer: Learn how to develop devices to quickly integrate them with IoT Platform.
Basic concepts: Learn the basic concepts of IoT Platform before you start.
FAQ: Find answers to frequently asked questions.
How it works
The following figure shows the message flow between IoT Platform, devices, servers, and clients.
To establish a complete communication link for a device using IoT Platform, you must complete device development, IoT Platform server development (including the configuration of the cloud SDK), database creation, and mobile app development. During this process, you must define and process device messages.
The following table describes how devices communicate with IoT Platform.
Communication link | Description |
Upstream communication | Devices use the MQTT protocol to establish persistent connections with IoT Platform. They report data to IoT Platform by publishing topics and payloads. |
Device messages are forwarded to your business server through an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) consumer group. | |
You can use the data forwarding feature of IoT Platform to process device-reported data and forward the processed data to other Alibaba Cloud services for storage and processing. These services include ApsaraDB RDS, Tablestore, Function Compute, Lindorm Time Series Database, Lindorm, PolarDB for MySQL, DataHub, and Message Queue for Apache RocketMQ. | |
Downstream commands | The business server calls the Pub API over HTTPS to send a command from a business application to a topic on IoT Platform. |
IoT Platform uses the MQTT protocol to publish data (a specified topic and payload) to the device. |
For more information about device communication, see Communication methods.
You can use the Data Service of IoT Platform to configure data ingestion, data parsing, data storage, data metrics, data analytics, data APIs, and data applications for your IoT devices and unlock the value of your device data. For more information, see Data Service.
Feature overview
Feature | Description |
Provides public instances for individual IoT developers and enterprise customers to try out IoT Platform features. After you activate IoT Platform, you can experience its features. For enterprise customers, IoT Platform instances support features such as device connectivity, management, O&M, and data services. | |
Supports fast device connection across multiple protocols (MQTT, CoAP, and HTTPS), platforms (C, Node.js, and Java), networks (2G/3G/4G/5G, NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, and Wi-Fi), and regions. This shortens the development cycle for connecting IoT devices to the cloud. | |
Provides highly reliable and secure device management capabilities. These include services such as lifecycle management, advanced search, tags, device jobs, device shadows, and device files. | |
Integrates with many Alibaba Cloud services, such as Tablestore, RDS, Lindorm, TSDB, FC, MNS, and RocketMQ, to meet business needs in different scenarios. These scenarios include M2M communication, device data storage, device data computing, and message queue services. | |
Provides capabilities for massive data ingestion, data parsing, data storage, data metrics, analytics, and data applications tailored to the characteristics of IoT data. This helps enterprise users easily unlock the value of their IoT data. | |
Provides instance-level monitoring and alerting, full-link log analysis, device over-the-air (OTA) updates, intelligent device diagnostics, and Security Center services. | |
Provides a rich set of value-added services for different types of smart devices, such as voice messaging, text messaging, location services, vocoder services, event response, and data intelligence. You can purchase and activate these services to enhance your device's business capabilities. |
For a complete list of IoT Platform features, see Features.
Benefits
Stable connectivity for a massive number of devices
Supports hundreds of millions of device connections and millions of concurrent messages. It provides defense against DDoS attacks of up to 600 Gbps at the access layer and a service-level agreement (SLA) of over 99.95%.
Low cost and global device access
Compared with self-managed MQTT clusters, IoT Platform offers more comprehensive management and operations and maintenance (O&M) capabilities at a significantly lower cost. It is deployed in eight regions worldwide, which allows devices to automatically connect to the nearest access point based on their location.
Ease of use and flexible scaling
IoT Platform offers multiple billing methods, such as pay-as-you-go and subscription. You can seamlessly scale your resources as your business grows. The platform provides one-stop device management, real-time monitoring for various scenarios, and seamless integration with other Alibaba Cloud services. This lets you flexibly and easily build complex IoT applications.
For more information about the benefits of IoT Platform, see Benefits.
Scenarios
IoT Platform can be used in scenarios such as smart homes, smart agriculture, and smart media to enhance the user experience in various applications. For scenario examples, see Scenarios.
Billing
IoT Platform supports the following billing methods: pay-as-you-go and subscription.
After you activate IoT Platform, a public instance is provided for you to try. Older public instances use the pay-as-you-go billing method. Newer public instances provide fixed resource specifications and are free of charge. You can purchase an Enterprise instance with a subscription billing method based on your business needs.
For more information about the billable items, billing methods, and billing components of IoT Platform, see Billing.
To activate and purchase the IoT Platform service, click Activate Service Now and then Purchase Enterprise Instance.
Usage
You can use IoT Platform in the following ways.
Method | Description |
Use an interactive web-based service page to manage your IoT Platform resources. | |
Cloud SDKs and Cloud APIs | Use a cloud SDK to send an HTTPS/HTTP GET or POST request to the API endpoint. Add the required request parameters to the request as described in the API documentation to call the API. You can use API online debugging tool to quickly retrieve APIs, call APIs online, and dynamically generate SDK sample code. For more information about how to use cloud SDKs, see Download a cloud SDK. |
Solutions
Other Alibaba Cloud IoT services
Cloud service | Description |
A device identity authentication service for IoT. It provides bidirectional identity authentication and link encryption between devices and the IoT Platform cloud. | |
Provides a series of convenient IoT development tools, such as visual development, business logic development, and data analytics. These tools help you efficiently and economically complete IoT data analysis, device, service, and application development, accelerating the construction of IoT SaaS. | |
An IoT SIM service. It is a one-stop IoT SIM card management platform for enterprise users. The SIM cards used by IoT devices use dedicated number segments to meet the networking needs of smart hardware and various industries. |
FAQ
Category | Question |
Alibaba Cloud services | |
Device connectivity |
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Message communication | |
Cloud SDKs and APIs | |
Other |