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

[borner791]

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

[Androider]

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-deprec...

[0xbadcafebee]

  [..] 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!

[game-of-throws]

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-...

[bmitc]

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.

[IshKebab]

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!

[pjmlp]

Why I only target Android with the NDK, or Web apps?

Because while they are natively supported on the device, they aren't tied to Android's future.

[mindcrime]

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.

[Animats]

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.

[dekhn]

Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) bring in multiple billions of revenue a year from enterprise. The company invested billions in new data centers and transferred large parts of intenral technical infrastructure into cloud to build these products over a decade.

If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely have no future in any enterprise product ever again.

I do expect them to aggressively trim small products from the cloud lineup that aren't worth the engineering investment. IoT clouds were a popular thing for several months and then people realized there wasn't a huge market or tons of profit.

[Mo3]

We've moved off GCP for exactly this reason recently. It's enough. They're probably not going to shut down the lower level infrastructure, but they simply can't be trusted.

[joezydeco]

How is IoT a hobbyist business?

I deployed a large restaurant equipment project on Azure backends and couldn't be happier.

I've made a policy of not touching Google for anything embedded-related and it continues to pay off.

I guess, yeah, anything non-AdWords related is a hobby. For Google.

[xs83]

Unfortunately they have this weird dichotomy where they have some of the most outstanding and ahead of the curve cloud services that make it worth it. This IoT Core thing is a shit show and I imagine they will introduce a partner who will do it instead of them.

But there is nothing like BigQuery on the market elsewhere, Cloud Run and PubSub are standout services that others have tried to emulate and haven't got near it, plus everything on GCP doesn't feel like either an afterthought (AWS) or a cobbling together of mismanaged and old-version open source services (AWS & Azure).

[radiojasper]

I just read an article that Discord is heavily relying on Google Cloud [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474093

[enos_feedler]

Hobbyist market is also not using gcp and more likely using digital ocean or similar

[nshm]

And tensorflow

[chickenpotpie]

Are you aware Snapchat has a two billion dollar contract with GCP? GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company.

[B-Con]

Not every product is in the experimental phase.

Google has a long history of experimenting with a product and then shutting down once they've learned enough. Maybe they learn it's not as lucrative, maybe they learn how to build the tech, maybe they learn they're too late, whatever. But it's experimental and the experiment doesn't prove to be the "next billion users" so it wanes and then dies.

Not every product is like that. Cloud isn't just some product on a spreadsheet next to IoT Core. The heavy players like Cloud, YouTube, Ads, etc, have massive investment, have dedicated CEOs, and are in it for the long haul.

Google's deprecation policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to every product uniformly.

[grepLeigh]

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

[2] https://www.asyncapi.com/

[codegangsta]

Don't hesitate to join the NATS slack group and reach out if you need any help, we're a friendly bunch

[xs83]

NATS doesn't support MQTTv5 so for serious MQTT usage it is still useless unfortunately.

[openthc]

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!"

[Nextgrid]

I hate the current trend of smearing your business logic across dozens of third-party providers with various business goals that rarely align with yours.

I'm also not confident that the constant churn of keeping up with API changes (if not outright deprecations like this) and costs of the third-party services end up costing you more than just doing it yourself.

Finally, what we've seen with Okta, Twilio, most recently MailChimp (which was used to attempt to attack DigitalOcean customers among others) clearly shows that these companies aren't magic and may not actually be any better than doing it yourself when it comes to security.

[andrewxdiamond]

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.

[gcharris]

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

[0xbadcafebee]

Supposedly the funding for Google Cloud will go bye-bye if they don't beat Azure by 2023. They won't axe all of Google Cloud, but I bet they'll start killing services that don't make money. (Remember: Google is an advertising company; loss-leading cloud services don't help them sell ads)

[neodypsis]

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.

[mhoad]

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...

[41b696ef1113]

Ah yes, the "It's still in Beta" defense.

[patwolf]

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]

We did this, EMQX + Kubernetes across multiple AZ's has worked very nicely so far and its cloud portable / on-prem if necessary :)

[goldash]

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/

[travisgriggs]

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]

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]

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.

[blacklight]

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.

[qbasic_forever]

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.

[smileybarry]

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]

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.

[StringyBob]

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]

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.

[nojvek]

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?

[edonosotti]

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

[goldash]

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/

[senssei]

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]

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.

[Apocryphon]

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?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

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]

Wait what? That’s like the opposite of what everyone here says. Like, Google has a bad reputation for doing this.

[Havoc]

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

[stingrae]

"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

[dqpb]

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

[xs83]

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.

[frays]

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.

[Sytten]

Looking at the 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]

EC2-Classic went away literally today :)

[FpUser]

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

[_HMCB_]

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

[kerblang]

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

[gregsadetsky]

Yep, see the discontinuation banner at the top of https://cloud.google.com/iot-core

[accelbred]

Perhaps one should just migrate to AWS IoT Core.

[goldash]

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/

[xs83]

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

[pcj-github]

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]

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.

[LightG]

Deprecation as a Service?

[qbasic_forever]

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

[nicosandller]

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]

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.

[darksofa]

This is really going to make 5 people angry.