Traditionally, the choice of cloud service provider for IoT applications has been determined by the cloud services, pricing, and availability dictated by local regulatory requirements and limitations. Now, with the onset of fog computing, additional factors have begun to take a front seat in determining cloud platform selection, such as scalability, security, ease of deployment, integration, and long-term maintenance. Between the cloud and the edge is the fog, with a distributed data analytics and computation architecture.
Many of the major cloud providers like AWS and Azure are comparable in terms of their platform features and continue to improve their offerings. However, for an IoT device, ease of integration and maintenance is analogous to the operating system running on the device.
OS Matters
Though most cloud providers allow devices with any operating system or bare metal to interface with their cloud services and RTOS like Azure RTOS and FreeRTOS are cloud agnostic, it is inevitable to exploit the many advantages of a specific RTOS with the corresponding cloud provider. This is because the platform providers offer special libraries or SDKs that seamlessly integrate with their cloud services. Some examples of this would be the FreeRTOS OTA libraries or Azure ADU libraries for firmware updates.
Both the Renesas RA and RX families of MCUs offer a comprehensive ecosystem enabling users to effortlessly connect to their preferred cloud services. The Flexible Software Package (FSP) and RX Driver Package (RDP) software packages supported on these MCUs are fully integrated with FreeRTOS and Azure RTOS allowing designers to expedite their IoT cloud application development.
RA and RX MCU applications use Secure Crypto Engine (SCE) hardware acceleration and Trusted Secure IP (TSIP) for enhanced security, thereby providing highly efficient and secure cloud solutions. In addition, Renesas partners like Crypto Quantique address the gaps in the cloud services to ensure a fully secure and scalable solution.
As a starting point to explore the multi-faceted requirements of cloud connectivity, Renesas offers Application Projects to connect to major cloud providers interfacing with different RTOS options and connectivity interfaces.
Visit the Cloud Solutions page for more details on Renesas solutions and kits providing straightforward end-to-end cloud connectivity.
Read more about deploying Renesas cloud kits in this blog.