Benchmarking Cloud Providers on Serverless IoT Back-End Infrastructures

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the trending topics in the technological revolution of the last decade. The huge amount of sensors composing IoT systems implies the need for powerful back-end infrastructures that find a perfect habitat in cloud services. Nowadays, many players offer cloud services and it is thus essential for the user to consciously learn which one mostly fits his needs. Among cloud providers, three conquered a leader position in the sector: 1) Amazon Web services; 2) Google cloud platform; and 3) Microsoft azure. In this article, we thoroughly test these providers to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. To produce relevant results, we stress a back-end infrastructure designed to handle a national-sized network of IoT nodes. Our analysis is not limited to the cloud provider performance as a whole, while it also investigates and compares several cloud components separately. As part of the contribution, we also test different time-series databases and we discuss the advantages of such kind of technologies. Finally, an in-depth pricing analysis is conducted to better understand the differences between each platform from an economic perspective.