Now, you have a basic idea about the available commercial IoT platforms and you can select one according to your comfort level and requirements. It will be very difficult to comprehensively explain every cloud platform with practical examples, as the objective of this chapter is to make you familiar with integrating the cloud platform with Python and Arduino. For this reason, we are going to use Xively as the de facto IoT cloud platform for the rest of the integration exercises.

Now that you know how to create an account on Xively and work with the Xively platform, it is time to start interfacing real hardware with the Xively platform. In this section, we will go through methods to upload and download data from Xively. We will combine the Arduino hardware that we built with the Python programs to show you basic methods of communicating with Xively.