Why We Switched to Google Cloud Platform
As IoT application deployments go global, customers demand more—greater flexibility and choice, better alignment to business objectives, and meaningful improvements to IoT program capabilities, cost, and security. IoT solution providers are looking for efficient ways to bring these benefits to their end customers, and hosting solutions in the cloud is key.
AWS, Google and Microsoft are the “big three” public cloud providers, and among them Google is typically considered the laggard, especially for IoT applications. But after an extensive evaluation of both providers, we at Aeris (an IoT technology partner with over a decade of experience deploying IoT projects for Fortune 100 companies) decided to use Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
What we have running in the cloud is the Fusion IoT Network — the first intelligent multimode 5G-ready solution, including LTE-M, NB-IoT, LTE and 2G/3G. Fusion IoT enables organizations implementing IoT solutions to use global wireless networks with one connectivity subscription on one platform, eliminating multi-network administrative overhead. Fusion IoT Network is built to scale. With operational reach in 180 countries, it handles more than a billion transactions a day for over 1000 customers worldwide.
We chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for our production environment due to several factors, including Kubernetes maturity, VPC IP networking capabilities, open-source APIs, costs, and governance. The rest of this article details our evaluation of GCP along these vectors.
We wanted to transition from a Cloud 1.0 approach, where we used managed VMs, to a Cloud 2.0 approach, where we use managed containers and Kubernetes. Cloud 2.0 is primarily about leveraging managed Kubernetes, which provides superior compute density for cost savings as well as orchestrated flexibility for more accurate deployments and performance.
Our analysis showed that GCP’s Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the best, most mature managed Kubernetes platform, which isn’t especially surprising since Google invented Kubernetes and continues to make regular contributions and updates to it in the open source community. We knew we would get Kubernetes updates more quickly if we went with GCP.
Fusion IoT is a cloud-native IoT network, and we wanted to move to a cloud provider with the best IP networking capabilities. Google’s Global Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) IP networking capabilities are the best we have seen of any cloud provider. Aeris is a global provider and we found that the Google IP network backbone provided lower latency for our use cases compared to what we were using previously.
Additionally, we found Google’s project and shared network capability as compelling and differentiated. GCP supports an ability to create discrete isolated VPC networks within a project but then share networks into the project for shared private access. This allowed us to create exact replicas of our network architecture for every phase of the deployment lifecycle, from our development environments to quality assurance environments, and all the way to our production environments. This is a powerful approach which provides better security, deployment accuracy, faster troubleshooting, and separation of concerns between our IP networking team and our automation for infrastructure as code.
The Google IP network, coupled with the Aeris cellular IoT network, will allow us to give our customers unprecedented performance, security, and flexibility.
Aeris and many enterprises are trending toward multi-cloud support. However, this can lead to an impediment for leveraging the full capabilities of the cloud providers. Care must be taken not to get locked into any particular cloud’s proprietary Platform as a Service (PaaS) services. On the other hand, running the equivalent services ourselves can be very resource-intensive. The emerging interoperable standards for PaaS are being driven by adoption of open source APIs.
