How to: IoT Alternatives and Lock-in
- 	AWS, Microsoft and Google have all introduced IoT-specific sets of cloud services since late 2015. AWS was first, moving their IoT services to [general availability](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-now-generally-available/) in Dec 2015. Microsoft released their set of IoT services for Azure in [Feb 2016](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/generally-available-microsoft-azure-iot-hub/).  Google has only previewed, but not released their IoT services [Android Things](https://developer.android.com/things/index.html) and [Weave](https://developers.google.com/weave/).
- 	Issues of lock-in center around your devices —  [protocols](http://www.postscapes.com/internet-of-things-protocols/) (for example MQTT, AMQP), message formats (such as, JSON vs. Hex...) and security (certificates).

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