Chapter 13. Building Your Own Cloud Platform to Control ESP8266 Devices

In all the previous chapters of this book, we have always used external services to connect our ESP8266 projects to the cloud. For example, we used services such as IFTTT, Adafruit IO, and aREST to control and monitor our projects from the cloud.

However, those services are all managed by other people or companies. This can pose security issues for some projects, and also those services can be shut down at any time, or at least not be managed properly. If you really want to have complete control over your cloud connected projects, the only way to go is to deploy your own server on the cloud.

This is exactly what we are going to do in this chapter. We are going to first create a cloud server so we can deploy web applications that can be accessed from anywhere. We are then going to discover how to deploy your own aREST cloud server on the server you just created. Finally, as a test, we'll connect a simple ESP8266 project...