17 ms·

Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

215 points by borner791 4y ago

Your current IoT Core Services will remain available through August 15, 2023. Start your migration to alternative solutions. Hello [NAME], We’re writing to let you know that Google Cloud’s IoT Core Service will be discontinued on August 16, 2023 at which point your access to the IoT Core Device Manager APIs will no longer be available. As of that date, devices will be unable to connect to the Google Cloud IoT Core MQTT and HTTP bridges and existing connections will be shut down. Your current IoT Core Services will remain available through August 15, 2023, unless you terminate your usage of IoT Core at an earlier date. What do I need to do? We recommend that you take action early to migrate from IoT Core to an alternative service. As an initial step, connect with your Google Cloud account manager if you have questions about your migration plans. Your account manager can also help you learn more about Google Cloud partners that offer alternative IoT technology or implementation services that meet your business requirements. Over the next year, we will continue to reach out with additional information to support you during your migration. —The Google Cloud IoT Core Product Team

LightG 4y ago
Deprecation as a Service?
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Google regrets to inform you that its Google Graveyard service deprecation service (aka Project Pallbearer) has now reached the end of its life and is deprecated. -This message generated by Google Graveyard service deprecation service
kerblang 4y ago
Are we talking about this? https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Yep, see the discontinuation banner at the top of https://cloud.google.com/iot-core https://cloud.google.com/iot-core
  - joegahona 4y ago
    > Google Cloud IoT Core is being retired on August 16, 2023. Contact your Google Cloud account team for more information. Gotta love the "retired" nomenclature -- as though it has had a long, productive career and now is the normal/usual time to end.
stingrae 4y ago
"Google Cloud IoT Core is being retired on August 16, 2023. Contact your Google Cloud account team for more information." -https://cloud.google.com/iot-core https://cloud.google.com/iot-core
gcharris 4y ago
I don't know why anyone would build anything that relies on a google offering these days. What are they going to discontinue next?
- neodypsis 4y ago
  That's why I prefer to invest time and effort on AWS. I know I won't have to rewrite everything from scratch whenever Google feels like abandoning their projects.
  - dark-star 4y ago
    AWS has never discontinued one of their services? Not trolling, seriously asking (I don't use hyperscalers)
    - elchief 4y ago
      There was an ML service before sagemaker that you can't start using anymore but I believe it still works for existing customers
    - neodypsis 4y ago
      To the best of my knowledge, no. At least none of the AWS services I've used. They've deprecated support for some CAs and stuff, but that seems reasonable.
      - softveda 4y ago
        Not a full service but partial features like S3 Bittorrent support was removed.
    - WoahNoun 4y ago
      Not that I'm aware of. They'd be fully justified in shutting down simpleDB since it hasn't had a feature update in over a decade, but they still keep it running. New accounts can't sign up for it and it only exists in the oldest regions. They were going to retire old s3 path styles, but they changed their mind after customer feedback.
StringyBob 4y ago
What devices are there in the field are reliant on the Google IoT Core Service platform? Are there ‘smart’ devices that are just going to stop working unless people rewrite the firmware for a different system like AWS or Azure IoT?
- baybal2 4y ago
  Exactly, everybody who bet on Google in IoT has just got a giant RMA bill. Same has happened when Azure changed its root cert, which was likelly hardcoded into 99% of deployed devices using it.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Do IoT devices not have a USB port to allow for updating of the firmware?
    - the_pwner224 4y ago
      A very large amount of customers are not technically competent enough to successfully update the firmware over USB. Also, from the business side, normally you would do OTA updates for deployed devices; now you need to build and deploy a customer-facing USB update tool for them to run on their laptops. And provide tech support for it, etc. For industrial or B2B IOT you would in many cases need to send out your own field techs to do the update, which costs $$$. So overall, even if you're not literally doing a RMA, it is very very expensive.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      some do but you need to actually take every device - which you may have sold to customers - and update. Industrial stuff has multi decade contracts often in remote places.
      - ctolkien 4y ago
        Devices we worked with for a project (thankfully not on GCP) are welded shut once built. They are designed to run for years on an internal battery then need to be recycled. They would all be paperweights in this scenario!
mindcrime 4y ago
Google should just go ahead and shut down their entire Cloud business. I mean, nobody in their right mind would build a business or anything substantial on top of any Google provided service, and the hobbyist market can't be that big. Just go ahead and drop out Google, and quit fucking wasting everybody's time.
- radiojasper 4y ago
  I just read an article that Discord is heavily relying on Google Cloud [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093
  - btgeekboy 4y ago
    Luckily, it sounds as if they’re relying mostly on lower level primitives vs. these higher level abstractions that are more likely to be discontinued.
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  Hobbyist market is also not using gcp and more likely using digital ocean or similar
- Animats 4y ago
  Yes. They already angered the game dev community, and few believe Stadia will stay around. This angers the industrial internet-of-things community. You can get Siemens industrial equipment tied to Google IoT Core. Hopefully you don't already have it installed. Industrial controls people think in terms of decades, not months. A Coursera class on Google IoT Core for industrial control started today. 77,000 people signed up.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    > Coursera class … started today… 77000 signed up That’s actually just a Coursera marketing tactic. Most of their courses are not real-time and are self-paced content. So, they act like they are starting the course “Today” every day, and the 77k enrolled is the # of enrolled users forever since the course has been offered. Totally misleading!
travisgriggs 4y ago
This is starting to feel like the Windows platform post MFC/Win32. Every couple years, it was a new initiative to get developers and the middle management deciders revved up. A sort of a “we’re building it so that you’ll come, right?” thing. And then a year or so later, a new initiative replaced it, the offering was dramatically watered down, or just altogether sunset’ed.
- cube00 4y ago
  In their defence at least MFC/Win32 is still patched and supported even if it's not getting new features. Although it's probably not the same because they don't have to run any physical hardware to keep it going like IoT Cloud needs.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  You can still get new project templates on VS 2022, bugs get fixed, and little things like HDPI support added. A very big difference with Google's offerings.
openthc 4y ago
hahaa; wow. So, we were doing this sensor project; and I picked "boring" things like raspberry-pi, python scripts, wiring the GPIO with a screw-down terminal or using SDR for other off-the shelf sensors to build the network. And in one of the demos showing our very low-budget type project a reviewer said: "you should look at IoT managers like the G offering, we're using it". So, they declined to use our methods and built their own around G-IoT. It's important to "own" what you can in your stack otherwise this vendor-driven-churn is forced on you and is outside a schedule you control. Sure, 365 days is a lot of time to migrate -- which, IME, leads to "we can fix this later" which then leads to "oh crap!"
- andrewxdiamond 4y ago
  I think it’s important to “own” what makes you different. Running your own servers isn’t that important and probably isn’t what makes you different. EC2, Azure VMs or whatever short term project Google is running for compute are all extremely comparable, and you loose very little by using them. But if your business is owning and operating an IoT platform for your customers, you should invest in a high quality solution, not just buying the off-the-shelf tool. It may be that a provider’s offering is better than what you can do, but it better be a lot better if you use it. The point is to invest heavily in what actually makes a difference, vertically integrate what matters, externalize what doesn’t.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Slightly disagree. The important thing is to externalise things that multiple providers support. So externalise hosting Postgres, because 20 companies exist that do that. Don't externalise a one of a kind service you can't build against using open standards. Insource that.
  - gerdesj 4y ago
    I think it is important to mostly be in charge of your own destiny too. When my doorbell (Doorbird) goes off at home the following happens: * A real chime sounds (battery backed, mains powered, no internet required) * Native app goes ape shit and twitters (often about two hours later) * Home Assistant app kicks in on queue and does what I tell it to: Speakers speak, SMS sent etc
baybal2 4y ago
nicosandller 4y ago
How are they going to keep the “google home” ecosystem alive without IoT Core ? They said they were going full on the matter protocol but I don’t see how this will replace it fully yet.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  There are so many different teams and organizations and acquisitions and such that I suspect Google Home has nothing at all to do with Google IoT. The IoT thing looks like it was focused more on being device management presumably to help funnel industrial and embedded customers in to using GCP and other Google cloud services. The Google Home stuff is probably all from Nest and such and entirely separate.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Wow one year to move off seems pretty fast for embedded customers. I'm going to guess they have very little real-world usage and customers.
game-of-throws 4y ago
3 years ago Google killed off Android Things[1] and told everyone to migrate to IoT Core. Now IoT Core is dead. But don't worry about all that, just connect with your Google Cloud account manager! They'll tell you exactly which Google platform you should migrate to next. [1]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-on-android-things.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-...
- bmitc 4y ago
  This reminds me of a David Letterman skit where Letterman was working at a Taco Bell drivethru. He told a customer that they were out of several drinks in a row and then said something like “ma’am, I need to know what drink you want so that I can tell you we’re out of it” in response to the lady asking what drinks did they have.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    Reminds me of an old Soviet joke. A guy walks into a shop, sees how empty it is and asks "You're out of beef?" The clerk explains, "No, the butcher's shop across the street is the one who is out of beef. At this store, we specialize in being out of fish".
  - cangencer 4y ago
    Like the good old Monty Python cheese shop :) https://youtu.be/Hz1JWzyvv8A https://youtu.be/Hz1JWzyvv8A
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah IoT definitely seems to be following Google's messaging strategy - if the platform isn't a runaway success, delete it and start again. Maybe people will love the new platform!
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Are they too spoiled by the early days of the internet when that would happen regularly because they were simply first? Does it ever still happen?
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Well that's hilarious. And here I was always told that Google Cloud was supposed to be the one that didn't kill services.
- MaxDPS 4y ago
  Wait what? That’s like the opposite of what everyone here says. Like, Google has a bad reputation for doing this.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Sure, Google at large has a reputation for randomly axing products, but a frequent defense I see in such threads is something like "sure it might kill consumer products, but GCP is a different thing aimed at Enterprise that wouldn't do that". (I say that I see this argued, not that I hold the position myself.)
patwolf 4y ago
I've been a defender of GCP in the past, and I've been quick to point out that while Google has a reputation for killing products, GCP has been fairly stable. This, however, changes my opinion. I've been successfully using Cloud IoT for a few years. Now I need to find an alternative. There's a vendor named ClearBlade that announced today a direct migration path, but at this point I'd rather roll my own.
- xs83 4y ago
  We did this, EMQX + Kubernetes across multiple AZ's has worked very nicely so far and its cloud portable / on-prem if necessary :)
- mcsereno 4y ago
  [dead]
- OneWolf 4y ago
  [dead]
- goldash 4y ago
  If you are looking to find a way to migrate from Google, Qubitro offers you a warm welcome. The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/ https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/
Sytten 4y ago
Looking at the release notes (https://cloud.google.com/iot/docs/release-notes https://cloud.google.com/iot/docs/release-notes) it seems like you could see it coming as there was no new features since 2019. This doesn't help GCP credibility compared to other cloud providers, AWS still supports legacy EC2-Classic from the early 2010s for god sake.
- thenickdude 4y ago
  EC2-Classic went away literally today :)
Apocryphon 4y ago
At this point it might be useful to think of what Google projects are unlikely to be deprecated soon, or rather, has the potential of surviving deprecation. For instance, would Flutter being an open-source framework be able to save it from Google discontinuing it? Or is having to update it to mimic iOS behavior across its Cupertino widgets with each update too much?
grepLeigh 4y ago
I'm in the process of migrating PrintNanny.ai's remote command/event system off Cloud IoT Core. I've been running on IoT Core for 1.5 years. Here's my breakdown of the costs... - $236.99 in usage, approx 1% of project's total revenue - ~20 hours to implement pub/sub applications running on a mix of Raspberry Pi & GCP VMs. Implementations were in Rust and Python. It would have taken much, much longer to stand up a managed MQTT broker and identity/key management that I felt comfortable using in my own home, let alone providing to customers. - Hundreds of hours implementing and debugging glue between GCP's Pub/Sub product, websocket-based subscribers, and MQTT subscribers/publishers. I don't regret my decision (wouldn't have shipped otherwise), but I'm looking forward to the next phase. Here's what I'm migrating towards: - NATs message broker. NATS supports connections via MQTT and Websocket protocols, besides NATS own protocol. - django-nats-nkeys for org, identity, and JWT management (not production-ready, don't use this until I've been eating my own dog food for a few months) [1] - AsyncAPI schemas [2] for core message APIs, including schemas for 3rd-party printer software events (OctoPrint, Moonraker, Repetier, etc). This will underpin PrintNanny's plugin system. [1] https://github.com/bitsy-ai/django-nats-nkeys https://github.com/bitsy-ai/django-nats-nkeys [2] https://www.asyncapi.com/ https://www.asyncapi.com/
- codegangsta 4y ago
  Don't hesitate to join the NATS slack group and reach out if you need any help, we're a friendly bunch
  - grepLeigh 4y ago
    Oh very cool, see you in there! Thanks for the work you've put in.
  - lsllc 4y ago
    Good to know, perhaps over a Martini?
- xs83 4y ago
  NATS doesn't support MQTTv5 so for serious MQTT usage it is still useless unfortunately.
Androider 4y ago
If you haven't, please read the classic "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You" [1] by the always fantastic Steve Yegge (who used to work at Google). As he so succinctly put it, the email follows the standard Google GCP template: Dear RECIPIENT, Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem. We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year. Please go fuck yourself, Google Cloud Platform [1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  [..] in the Google world, deprecation means: “We are breaking our commitments to you.” It really does. That’s what it ultimately means. It means they are going to force you to do some work, possibly a large amount of rework, on a regular basis, as punishment for doing what they told you to do originally — as punishment for listening to their glossy marketing on their website: Better software. Faster! You do everything they tell you to do, and you launch your application or service, and then, bang, a year or two later it breaks down. I didn't know Steve was a Kubernetes admin!
_HMCB_ 4y ago
Google Graveyard is the second most consistent thing they’ve ever contributed to society.
FpUser 4y ago
I ignore every Google product / service since I know better. Well I do use search and youtube but that is universal I think
mhoad 4y ago
I see Google is getting a spanking in this thread and I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that they don’t deserve it. However, I hadn’t seen anyone mention the specific Enterprise API / product designation they rolled out over a year ago to deal with this kind of thing. If I understood things correctly when they launched it [1] the plan was to start by saying which parts of the GCP platform you could confidently rely on with the implication that the other parts you should understand you’re using products and services that haven’t proven their long term value inside of Google and as a result things like this can happen and you should plan accordingly. As far as I know this is the first thing to go since making that announcement but I’d be happy to be corrected as well. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new-api-stability-tenets-govern-google-enterprise-apis https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new...
- 41b696ef1113 4y ago
  Ah yes, the "It's still in Beta" defense.
throwawaymanbot 4y ago
pcj-github 4y ago
I don't work for Google or really care, but the GCP bashing dogpile every time they cancel a product is just getting pretty unimaginative. They offer hundreds to thousands of services, and some bets just don't work out. Glad to see many other people have perfectly functioning crystal balls.
- cheeselip420 4y ago
  They are free to shut down their services whenever they want - but good luck trying to win sales if they keep doing this. Especially given their reputation.
accelbred 4y ago
Perhaps one should just migrate to AWS IoT Core.
- xs83 4y ago
  It is unfortunately the least garbage of most of the cloud providers, but until it supports MQTTv5 out of the box then it is useless for most modern MQTT deployments
- goldash 4y ago
  If there is anyone trying to find a way to migrate from Google, Qubitro offers you a warm welcome. The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/ https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/
dqpb 4y ago
I wonder what it’s like spending the best years of your life building vaporware for Google.
xs83 4y ago
This doesnt surprise me, I wrote about this not long ago and how the Cloud Providers are only paying basic lip service to MQTT and IoT. There is not one single Cloud Provider that implements MQTTv5 properly (Azure implements a subset of it), and considering it came out in 2019 after being in "close to final draft" status for several years before that, the clouds have been very slow to pick this up. I refuse to believe that anyone is actually using IoT Core on AWS or GCP for modern MQTT workloads. Pulling data in from a few "things" - sure, but industrial level capability across multiple systems, I really don't see it.
nojvek 4y ago
Google was probably first when it came to managing 100s of 1000s of servers. They had the know how, they could have eclipsed AWS before they could even start. They weren’t too late to the game either, Azure started late and ramped up fast. The scale at which Google managed to fuck up their cloud business says a lot about their DNA. I was so excited about AlloyDB, but the documentation is crap. After two days of setting things up and dealing with their complex network configuration I gave up. Why would they make it so complex for a new dev to try their shiny new DB? Do cloud googlers seriously not think about new user experience?
darksofa 4y ago
This is really going to make 5 people angry.
sismo 4y ago
- myIOT 4y ago
blacklight 4y ago
So Google is basically breaking their commitments to their own users again, they don't give a fuck about back-compatibility as usual, they feel like the whole world should care of what their internal product teams want to do, and they feel entitled to set whatever arbitrary deadline for users to migrate (usually less than a year), and if you don't migrate then your money-making software will just stop working. Oh, and of course they provide no customer support whatsoever nor any way to provide feedback - because, of course, it's Google, and it needs to be dumbly unhuman and faceless to the core. Google has become an abomination and a complete denial of what software is supposed to be. It deserves to die in a ball of fire, and none of its shitty products should be spared.
Havoc 4y ago
Pretty wild for IOT. Short of extensive OTA update infra being in place that likely bricks devices in the field
smileybarry 4y ago
I'd think IoT-related services (especially an entire gateway) would have years-long deprecation schedules, not a single year. If you coupled your product to cloud-based updates only (no companion app stuff), then this means your unsold inventory right now has a timer to be sold until it's dead and requires shipping back for manual updating.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  Also means it's price should get discounted for that swapping out, and for "essential" stuff, like the things you stock spares for, your customers will have to go through two cycles of swapping.
sennasempre 4y ago
svihs 4y ago
frays 4y ago
How could the costs of keeping a managed MQTT service running for a few more years possibly outweigh the negative press from this move? I just don't understand.
senssei 4y ago
Honesty, this is "just" MQTT/HTTPS ingress. Further communication to Pub/Sub wouldn't change in any way. IoT Core as a service has some design choices that make it attractive such as JWT token auth, and complex to optimize, such as communication pattern details. If any of you would be interested in migrating to a fully compatible solution, give me a shout at rwarz[at]softserveinc.com since we are building one ;)
- jonsmirl 4y ago
  Use JWT over HTTPS to RealtimeDB. Has the same presence detection as MQTT. A lot cheaper too. I actually like it better than using MQTT. All of our devices attach to multiple RealtimeDB and then we sweep the data into Firestore for human interaction. Front end for RealtimeDB is open source so you can port it.
edonosotti 4y ago
Totally ridiculous. Sunsetting a major service like this in 2022 just proves their platform to be unreliable and unfit for enterprise-grade projects.
goldash 4y ago
If there is anyone trying to find a way to migrate from Google, Qubitro offers you a warm welcome. The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/ https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/

215 points by borner791 4y ago

LightG 4y ago

Deprecation as a Service?

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Google regrets to inform you that its Google Graveyard service deprecation service (aka Project Pallbearer) has now reached the end of its life and is deprecated. -This message generated by Google Graveyard service deprecation service

kerblang 4y ago

Are we talking about this? https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot

gregsadetsky 4y ago
Yep, see the discontinuation banner at the top of https://cloud.google.com/iot-core https://cloud.google.com/iot-core
- joegahona 4y ago
  > Google Cloud IoT Core is being retired on August 16, 2023. Contact your Google Cloud account team for more information. Gotta love the "retired" nomenclature -- as though it has had a long, productive career and now is the normal/usual time to end.

stingrae 4y ago

"Google Cloud IoT Core is being retired on August 16, 2023. Contact your Google Cloud account team for more information." -https://cloud.google.com/iot-core https://cloud.google.com/iot-core

gcharris 4y ago

I don't know why anyone would build anything that relies on a google offering these days. What are they going to discontinue next?

neodypsis 4y ago
That's why I prefer to invest time and effort on AWS. I know I won't have to rewrite everything from scratch whenever Google feels like abandoning their projects.
- dark-star 4y ago
  AWS has never discontinued one of their services? Not trolling, seriously asking (I don't use hyperscalers)
  - elchief 4y ago
    There was an ML service before sagemaker that you can't start using anymore but I believe it still works for existing customers
  - neodypsis 4y ago
    To the best of my knowledge, no. At least none of the AWS services I've used. They've deprecated support for some CAs and stuff, but that seems reasonable.
    - softveda 4y ago
      Not a full service but partial features like S3 Bittorrent support was removed.
  - WoahNoun 4y ago
    Not that I'm aware of. They'd be fully justified in shutting down simpleDB since it hasn't had a feature update in over a decade, but they still keep it running. New accounts can't sign up for it and it only exists in the oldest regions. They were going to retire old s3 path styles, but they changed their mind after customer feedback.

StringyBob 4y ago

What devices are there in the field are reliant on the Google IoT Core Service platform? Are there ‘smart’ devices that are just going to stop working unless people rewrite the firmware for a different system like AWS or Azure IoT?

baybal2 4y ago
Exactly, everybody who bet on Google in IoT has just got a giant RMA bill. Same has happened when Azure changed its root cert, which was likelly hardcoded into 99% of deployed devices using it.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Do IoT devices not have a USB port to allow for updating of the firmware?
  - the_pwner224 4y ago
    A very large amount of customers are not technically competent enough to successfully update the firmware over USB. Also, from the business side, normally you would do OTA updates for deployed devices; now you need to build and deploy a customer-facing USB update tool for them to run on their laptops. And provide tech support for it, etc. For industrial or B2B IOT you would in many cases need to send out your own field techs to do the update, which costs $$$. So overall, even if you're not literally doing a RMA, it is very very expensive.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    some do but you need to actually take every device - which you may have sold to customers - and update. Industrial stuff has multi decade contracts often in remote places.
    - ctolkien 4y ago
      Devices we worked with for a project (thankfully not on GCP) are welded shut once built. They are designed to run for years on an internal battery then need to be recycled. They would all be paperweights in this scenario!

mindcrime 4y ago

Google should just go ahead and shut down their entire Cloud business. I mean, nobody in their right mind would build a business or anything substantial on top of any Google provided service, and the hobbyist market can't be that big. Just go ahead and drop out Google, and quit fucking wasting everybody's time.

radiojasper 4y ago
I just read an article that Discord is heavily relying on Google Cloud [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093
- btgeekboy 4y ago
  Luckily, it sounds as if they’re relying mostly on lower level primitives vs. these higher level abstractions that are more likely to be discontinued.
enos_feedler 4y ago
Hobbyist market is also not using gcp and more likely using digital ocean or similar
Animats 4y ago
Yes. They already angered the game dev community, and few believe Stadia will stay around. This angers the industrial internet-of-things community. You can get Siemens industrial equipment tied to Google IoT Core. Hopefully you don't already have it installed. Industrial controls people think in terms of decades, not months. A Coursera class on Google IoT Core for industrial control started today. 77,000 people signed up.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > Coursera class … started today… 77000 signed up That’s actually just a Coursera marketing tactic. Most of their courses are not real-time and are self-paced content. So, they act like they are starting the course “Today” every day, and the 77k enrolled is the # of enrolled users forever since the course has been offered. Totally misleading!

travisgriggs 4y ago

This is starting to feel like the Windows platform post MFC/Win32. Every couple years, it was a new initiative to get developers and the middle management deciders revved up. A sort of a “we’re building it so that you’ll come, right?” thing. And then a year or so later, a new initiative replaced it, the offering was dramatically watered down, or just altogether sunset’ed.

cube00 4y ago
In their defence at least MFC/Win32 is still patched and supported even if it's not getting new features. Although it's probably not the same because they don't have to run any physical hardware to keep it going like IoT Cloud needs.
pjmlp 4y ago
You can still get new project templates on VS 2022, bugs get fixed, and little things like HDPI support added. A very big difference with Google's offerings.

openthc 4y ago

hahaa; wow. So, we were doing this sensor project; and I picked "boring" things like raspberry-pi, python scripts, wiring the GPIO with a screw-down terminal or using SDR for other off-the shelf sensors to build the network. And in one of the demos showing our very low-budget type project a reviewer said: "you should look at IoT managers like the G offering, we're using it". So, they declined to use our methods and built their own around G-IoT. It's important to "own" what you can in your stack otherwise this vendor-driven-churn is forced on you and is outside a schedule you control. Sure, 365 days is a lot of time to migrate -- which, IME, leads to "we can fix this later" which then leads to "oh crap!"

andrewxdiamond 4y ago
I think it’s important to “own” what makes you different. Running your own servers isn’t that important and probably isn’t what makes you different. EC2, Azure VMs or whatever short term project Google is running for compute are all extremely comparable, and you loose very little by using them. But if your business is owning and operating an IoT platform for your customers, you should invest in a high quality solution, not just buying the off-the-shelf tool. It may be that a provider’s offering is better than what you can do, but it better be a lot better if you use it. The point is to invest heavily in what actually makes a difference, vertically integrate what matters, externalize what doesn’t.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Slightly disagree. The important thing is to externalise things that multiple providers support. So externalise hosting Postgres, because 20 companies exist that do that. Don't externalise a one of a kind service you can't build against using open standards. Insource that.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  I think it is important to mostly be in charge of your own destiny too. When my doorbell (Doorbird) goes off at home the following happens: * A real chime sounds (battery backed, mains powered, no internet required) * Native app goes ape shit and twitters (often about two hours later) * Home Assistant app kicks in on queue and does what I tell it to: Speakers speak, SMS sent etc

baybal2 4y ago

nicosandller 4y ago

How are they going to keep the “google home” ecosystem alive without IoT Core ? They said they were going full on the matter protocol but I don’t see how this will replace it fully yet.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
There are so many different teams and organizations and acquisitions and such that I suspect Google Home has nothing at all to do with Google IoT. The IoT thing looks like it was focused more on being device management presumably to help funnel industrial and embedded customers in to using GCP and other Google cloud services. The Google Home stuff is probably all from Nest and such and entirely separate.

qbasic_forever 4y ago

Wow one year to move off seems pretty fast for embedded customers. I'm going to guess they have very little real-world usage and customers.

game-of-throws 4y ago

3 years ago Google killed off Android Things[1] and told everyone to migrate to IoT Core. Now IoT Core is dead. But don't worry about all that, just connect with your Google Cloud account manager! They'll tell you exactly which Google platform you should migrate to next. [1]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-on-android-things.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-...

bmitc 4y ago
This reminds me of a David Letterman skit where Letterman was working at a Taco Bell drivethru. He told a customer that they were out of several drinks in a row and then said something like “ma’am, I need to know what drink you want so that I can tell you we’re out of it” in response to the lady asking what drinks did they have.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Reminds me of an old Soviet joke. A guy walks into a shop, sees how empty it is and asks "You're out of beef?" The clerk explains, "No, the butcher's shop across the street is the one who is out of beef. At this store, we specialize in being out of fish".
- cangencer 4y ago
  Like the good old Monty Python cheese shop :) https://youtu.be/Hz1JWzyvv8A https://youtu.be/Hz1JWzyvv8A
IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah IoT definitely seems to be following Google's messaging strategy - if the platform isn't a runaway success, delete it and start again. Maybe people will love the new platform!
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Are they too spoiled by the early days of the internet when that would happen regularly because they were simply first? Does it ever still happen?

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

Well that's hilarious. And here I was always told that Google Cloud was supposed to be the one that didn't kill services.

MaxDPS 4y ago
Wait what? That’s like the opposite of what everyone here says. Like, Google has a bad reputation for doing this.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Sure, Google at large has a reputation for randomly axing products, but a frequent defense I see in such threads is something like "sure it might kill consumer products, but GCP is a different thing aimed at Enterprise that wouldn't do that". (I say that I see this argued, not that I hold the position myself.)

patwolf 4y ago

I've been a defender of GCP in the past, and I've been quick to point out that while Google has a reputation for killing products, GCP has been fairly stable. This, however, changes my opinion. I've been successfully using Cloud IoT for a few years. Now I need to find an alternative. There's a vendor named ClearBlade that announced today a direct migration path, but at this point I'd rather roll my own.

xs83 4y ago
We did this, EMQX + Kubernetes across multiple AZ's has worked very nicely so far and its cloud portable / on-prem if necessary :)
mcsereno 4y ago
[dead]
OneWolf 4y ago
[dead]
goldash 4y ago
If you are looking to find a way to migrate from Google, Qubitro offers you a warm welcome. The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/ https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/

Sytten 4y ago

Looking at the release notes (https://cloud.google.com/iot/docs/release-notes https://cloud.google.com/iot/docs/release-notes) it seems like you could see it coming as there was no new features since 2019. This doesn't help GCP credibility compared to other cloud providers, AWS still supports legacy EC2-Classic from the early 2010s for god sake.

thenickdude 4y ago
EC2-Classic went away literally today :)

Apocryphon 4y ago

At this point it might be useful to think of what Google projects are unlikely to be deprecated soon, or rather, has the potential of surviving deprecation. For instance, would Flutter being an open-source framework be able to save it from Google discontinuing it? Or is having to update it to mimic iOS behavior across its Cupertino widgets with each update too much?

grepLeigh 4y ago

I'm in the process of migrating PrintNanny.ai's remote command/event system off Cloud IoT Core. I've been running on IoT Core for 1.5 years. Here's my breakdown of the costs... - $236.99 in usage, approx 1% of project's total revenue - ~20 hours to implement pub/sub applications running on a mix of Raspberry Pi & GCP VMs. Implementations were in Rust and Python. It would have taken much, much longer to stand up a managed MQTT broker and identity/key management that I felt comfortable using in my own home, let alone providing to customers. - Hundreds of hours implementing and debugging glue between GCP's Pub/Sub product, websocket-based subscribers, and MQTT subscribers/publishers. I don't regret my decision (wouldn't have shipped otherwise), but I'm looking forward to the next phase. Here's what I'm migrating towards: - NATs message broker. NATS supports connections via MQTT and Websocket protocols, besides NATS own protocol. - django-nats-nkeys for org, identity, and JWT management (not production-ready, don't use this until I've been eating my own dog food for a few months) [1] - AsyncAPI schemas [2] for core message APIs, including schemas for 3rd-party printer software events (OctoPrint, Moonraker, Repetier, etc). This will underpin PrintNanny's plugin system. [1] https://github.com/bitsy-ai/django-nats-nkeys https://github.com/bitsy-ai/django-nats-nkeys [2] https://www.asyncapi.com/ https://www.asyncapi.com/

codegangsta 4y ago
Don't hesitate to join the NATS slack group and reach out if you need any help, we're a friendly bunch
- grepLeigh 4y ago
  Oh very cool, see you in there! Thanks for the work you've put in.
- lsllc 4y ago
  Good to know, perhaps over a Martini?
xs83 4y ago
NATS doesn't support MQTTv5 so for serious MQTT usage it is still useless unfortunately.

Androider 4y ago

If you haven't, please read the classic "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You" [1] by the always fantastic Steve Yegge (who used to work at Google). As he so succinctly put it, the email follows the standard Google GCP template: Dear RECIPIENT, Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem. We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year. Please go fuck yourself, Google Cloud Platform [1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
[..] in the Google world, deprecation means: “We are breaking our commitments to you.” It really does. That’s what it ultimately means. It means they are going to force you to do some work, possibly a large amount of rework, on a regular basis, as punishment for doing what they told you to do originally — as punishment for listening to their glossy marketing on their website: Better software. Faster! You do everything they tell you to do, and you launch your application or service, and then, bang, a year or two later it breaks down. I didn't know Steve was a Kubernetes admin!

_HMCB_ 4y ago

Google Graveyard is the second most consistent thing they’ve ever contributed to society.

FpUser 4y ago

I ignore every Google product / service since I know better. Well I do use search and youtube but that is universal I think

mhoad 4y ago

I see Google is getting a spanking in this thread and I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that they don’t deserve it. However, I hadn’t seen anyone mention the specific Enterprise API / product designation they rolled out over a year ago to deal with this kind of thing. If I understood things correctly when they launched it [1] the plan was to start by saying which parts of the GCP platform you could confidently rely on with the implication that the other parts you should understand you’re using products and services that haven’t proven their long term value inside of Google and as a result things like this can happen and you should plan accordingly. As far as I know this is the first thing to go since making that announcement but I’d be happy to be corrected as well. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new-api-stability-tenets-govern-google-enterprise-apis https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new...

41b696ef1113 4y ago
Ah yes, the "It's still in Beta" defense.

throwawaymanbot 4y ago

pcj-github 4y ago

I don't work for Google or really care, but the GCP bashing dogpile every time they cancel a product is just getting pretty unimaginative. They offer hundreds to thousands of services, and some bets just don't work out. Glad to see many other people have perfectly functioning crystal balls.

cheeselip420 4y ago
They are free to shut down their services whenever they want - but good luck trying to win sales if they keep doing this. Especially given their reputation.

accelbred 4y ago

Perhaps one should just migrate to AWS IoT Core.

xs83 4y ago
It is unfortunately the least garbage of most of the cloud providers, but until it supports MQTTv5 out of the box then it is useless for most modern MQTT deployments
goldash 4y ago
If there is anyone trying to find a way to migrate from Google, Qubitro offers you a warm welcome. The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/ https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/

dqpb 4y ago

I wonder what it’s like spending the best years of your life building vaporware for Google.

xs83 4y ago

This doesnt surprise me, I wrote about this not long ago and how the Cloud Providers are only paying basic lip service to MQTT and IoT. There is not one single Cloud Provider that implements MQTTv5 properly (Azure implements a subset of it), and considering it came out in 2019 after being in "close to final draft" status for several years before that, the clouds have been very slow to pick this up. I refuse to believe that anyone is actually using IoT Core on AWS or GCP for modern MQTT workloads. Pulling data in from a few "things" - sure, but industrial level capability across multiple systems, I really don't see it.

nojvek 4y ago

Google was probably first when it came to managing 100s of 1000s of servers. They had the know how, they could have eclipsed AWS before they could even start. They weren’t too late to the game either, Azure started late and ramped up fast. The scale at which Google managed to fuck up their cloud business says a lot about their DNA. I was so excited about AlloyDB, but the documentation is crap. After two days of setting things up and dealing with their complex network configuration I gave up. Why would they make it so complex for a new dev to try their shiny new DB? Do cloud googlers seriously not think about new user experience?

darksofa 4y ago

This is really going to make 5 people angry.

sismo 4y ago

myIOT 4y ago

blacklight 4y ago

So Google is basically breaking their commitments to their own users again, they don't give a fuck about back-compatibility as usual, they feel like the whole world should care of what their internal product teams want to do, and they feel entitled to set whatever arbitrary deadline for users to migrate (usually less than a year), and if you don't migrate then your money-making software will just stop working. Oh, and of course they provide no customer support whatsoever nor any way to provide feedback - because, of course, it's Google, and it needs to be dumbly unhuman and faceless to the core. Google has become an abomination and a complete denial of what software is supposed to be. It deserves to die in a ball of fire, and none of its shitty products should be spared.

Havoc 4y ago

Pretty wild for IOT. Short of extensive OTA update infra being in place that likely bricks devices in the field

smileybarry 4y ago

I'd think IoT-related services (especially an entire gateway) would have years-long deprecation schedules, not a single year. If you coupled your product to cloud-based updates only (no companion app stuff), then this means your unsold inventory right now has a timer to be sold until it's dead and requires shipping back for manual updating.

Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
Also means it's price should get discounted for that swapping out, and for "essential" stuff, like the things you stock spares for, your customers will have to go through two cycles of swapping.

sennasempre 4y ago

svihs 4y ago

frays 4y ago

How could the costs of keeping a managed MQTT service running for a few more years possibly outweigh the negative press from this move? I just don't understand.

senssei 4y ago

Honesty, this is "just" MQTT/HTTPS ingress. Further communication to Pub/Sub wouldn't change in any way. IoT Core as a service has some design choices that make it attractive such as JWT token auth, and complex to optimize, such as communication pattern details. If any of you would be interested in migrating to a fully compatible solution, give me a shout at rwarz[at]softserveinc.com since we are building one ;)

jonsmirl 4y ago
Use JWT over HTTPS to RealtimeDB. Has the same presence detection as MQTT. A lot cheaper too. I actually like it better than using MQTT. All of our devices attach to multiple RealtimeDB and then we sweep the data into Firestore for human interaction. Front end for RealtimeDB is open source so you can port it.

edonosotti 4y ago

Totally ridiculous. Sunsetting a major service like this in 2022 just proves their platform to be unreliable and unfit for enterprise-grade projects.

goldash 4y ago

If there is anyone trying to find a way to migrate from Google, Qubitro offers you a warm welcome. The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/ https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/