Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services announced AWS IoT, a new platform to help customers build applications to connect devices through the cloud. AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices. With AWS IoT, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

AWS IoT supports HTTP and MQTT, a lightweight communication protocol specifically designed to tolerate intermittent connections, minimize the code footprint on devices, and reduce network bandwidth requirements. AWS IoT also supports other industry standard and custom protocols, and devices can communicate with each other even if they are using different protocols.

AWS IoT provides authentication and end to end encryption throughout all points of connection

The beta version of the service is available from Thursday.

The global market for "Internet of Things", the concept of connecting everyday devices to the Internet, will nearly triple to $1.7 trillion by 2020, research firm International Data Corp has estimated.

Technology firms including Google, Intel, Cisco Systems, Samsung, Microsoft and telecoms majors such as Vodafone and Verizon are betting heavily on the relatively new technology to drive revenue and profit in the future.

Amazon said on Thursday there were no minimum fees for AWS IoT and customers using the service will have to only pay for what they use.

The prices will be determined on the number of messages. Amazon said it would offer customers 250,000 free messages per month, for 12 months. Prices start at $5 for every million messages, the company said.