I’m kind of swimming upstream in IoT land by not using Azure/AWS/GCP IoT services. My basic premise is for small/mid size systems, you can run then entire IoT cloud portion on one $5/mo digital ocean server, and this covers a lot of use cases. However, I’m relatively inexperienced at distributed systems, so may be missing something …
I think SIOT is creating a baseline for someone to setup their own end-to-end IOT system. So choice is to learn to fish or eat a cooked fish ( AWS, GCS and so on ), I would usually prefer to learn to fish