The Internet of Things, or IoT, is a collective term for physical objects that are connected to the internet. You will no doubt be using many IoT devices today, such as smartwatches, Google Home, or wirelessly controlled light bulbs.
Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows us to securely connect, manage, and ingest data from devices spread around the globe. It is also completely serverless, meaning no upfront software installation. Cloud IoT Core integrates with other GCP services to offer a complete solution for collecting, processing, and analyzing data in real time. Let's look at the following diagram. It shows us where Cloud IoT Core sits in the overall end-to-end solution we have discussed in this chapter and the protocols that IoT devices can use to communicate with it—MQTT and HTTP:
