I am confused about the difference between gateway and Cloud IoT Core. Here are the instruction and the illustration.
It looks like a gateway is optional. If so, what is the purpose of adding a gateway? What are the different roles played by the gateway and Cloud IoT core.
It depends on the type of requirement or use case and the devices that you have with you.
In general, Gateway in IoT environment refers to a class of device that processes data on behalf of a group or cluster of devices.
Gateways are a powerful feature of Cloud IoT Core that bridges communication between constrained devices and Cloud IoT Core.
That is, the Gateway is a device that connects less capable devices to Cloud IoT Core and performs several tasks on the device's behalf, such as communication, authentication, storage, and processing. It also enables connectivity to the internet when the device cannot directly connect itself, such as a ZigBee or Bluetooth device. It can still leverage the capabilities of Cloud IoT Core and the rest of Google Cloud for processing, analyzing, and visualizing data in real time.
Gateway manages the less capable devices in the IoT environment. The devices shall be directly connected to Cloud IoT Core, but will receive updates from and publish telemetry events to the cloud through the gateway.
The cloud IoT Core is for managing gateways and also the devices that are fully capable on their own.
