Cloud infrastructure is one of IoT’s core backbones, handling data ingestion, device management, OTA updates, and the security that keeps connected devices authenticated and protected throughout their lifetime.
For developers on Nordic Semiconductor hardware, that infrastructure is nRF Cloud: a dedicated IoT platform built to pair Nordic’s low-power wireless chips with a full suite of cloud services, from provisioning and fleet management to location services and Memfault-powered observability.
Introduction to nRF Cloud
nRF Cloud is Nordic Semiconductor’s dedicated IoT cloud platform, purpose-built to connect, monitor, and manage wireless IoT devices throughout their entire lifecycle, from initial onboarding all the way through to decommissioning.
It offers a suite of services optimized for Nordic’s ultra-low power wireless devices, with out-of-the-box support and the ability to seamlessly scale from a handful of devices on a pilot run to thousands of devices in a full production deployment.
Unlike generic cloud platforms, nRF Cloud was built from the ground up with low power consumption in mind and supports transport-independent connectivity, offering device-to-cloud communication over MQTT or CoAP, and cloud-to-cloud interfaces via REST APIs.
This means it fits naturally into a wide variety of IoT architectures, whether your devices connect directly to nRF Cloud or route through your own existing cloud infrastructure. nRF Cloud Services are tightly integrated with nRF Connect SDK, Nordic’s unified and scalable software development kit, streamlining the development process and allowing developers to focus on building innovative applications without worrying about underlying cloud communication details.
Its key features are:
- Device management – which allows you to easily onboard, monitor, and manage your IoT devices at scale, tracking device health, connectivity status, and performance in real-time. Once devices are deployed, nRF Cloud enables you to maintain and monitor your device fleet over the full lifecycle, manage device configuration on the fly for optimal user experience and battery life, and deploy new firmware, bug fixes, and security patches.
- Data visualisation – nRF Cloud transforms raw sensor data into actionable insights through customizable dashboards, allowing teams to visualize trends, anomalies, and key metrics to make informed decisions.
- FOTA (Firmware Over-The-Air) – an indispensable capability to ensure that IoT devices in the field remain future-proof. It allows teams to accelerate time-to-market by shipping devices with a minimal feature set and deploying new features later, giving full control to update device groups or individual devices while managing multiple deployments for different targets. Security is a first-class concern here; update manifests are signed for authenticity and integrity, keeping the firmware update process separate from the underlying transport protocol.
- Flexible Connectivity – There are two main ways of using nRF Cloud services: Device-to-Cloud, where the device connects directly to nRF Cloud via CoAP or MQTT, and Cloud-to-Cloud, where the device is provisioned to the customer’s own cloud and that cloud communicates to nRF Cloud via a REST API. This flexibility means nRF Cloud can slot into existing architectures without requiring a complete infrastructure overhaul.
- Security services – At the heart of nRF Cloud’s security model is the concept of a hardware-rooted, cryptographically verifiable device identity. One of the most important aspects of nRF Cloud Security Services is its scope across the entire device lifecycle, meaning that lifetime security ensures that devices remain protected from commissioning to decommissioning. This is a meaningful commitment: security is not just something applied once at the start of a product’s life, but something actively maintained through the combination of secure identity, remote provisioning, encrypted communications, and FOTA updates that can push security patches to devices already in the field.
nRF Cloud and the nRF Connect SDK
The nRF Connect SDK (NCS) is Nordic Semiconductor’s unified, open-source software development kit for building applications across its entire hardware portfolio: the nRF52, nRF53, nRF54, nRF70, and nRF91 series devices.
The nRF Connect SDK uses Zephyr as its foundation and on top of Zephyr, the nRF Connect SDK includes Nordic proprietary features and technology, providing developers with a breadth and depth of functionality available out of the box: samples, wireless stacks, networking protocols, drivers, security, and much more.
This move to a unified, Zephyr-based SDK represents a deliberate shift away from Nordic’s legacy nRF5 SDK; we’ve covered why Nordic made that transition in more detail here. One of nRF Cloud’s most significant advantages is not a cloud feature at all, it is what happens long before a device ever connects to the internet.
The tight integration between nRF Cloud and the nRF Connect SDK means that the gap between writing firmware and having a cloud-connected, production-ready device is dramatically narrower than it would be on any generic IoT platform. At the heart of the nRF Cloud SDK integration is the dedicated nRF Cloud library bundled directly within the SDK.
The nRF Cloud library enables applications to connect to Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF Cloud, abstracting and hiding the details of the transport and the encoding scheme used for the payload, and providing a simplified API interface for sending data to the cloud. nRF Cloud’s core services such as location data, GNSS assistance, sensor telemetry, device shadow updates, and FOTA are all accessible through clean, well-documented SDK APIs rather than raw protocol implementations.
Getting started with nRF Cloud
Sign up to nRF Cloud
Create an account at nRF Cloud with a few easy steps and you are ready to test and run all the features and services that nRF Cloud provides for free (up to 10 connected devices, for more devices you just need to upgrade your account).
Setting up the devices
Nordic’s nRF Connect SDK provides plenty of samples to run all kinds of applications on their devices, including samples to connect and send data to nRF Cloud. So, you can test nRF Cloud functionality by running ready-to-go samples, or you can use those samples to streamline the development of your application. To connect your device and use nRF Cloud services, you need to create certificates and security tags for connecting to nRF Cloud, then add your device to your account. For nRF9161 or nRF9151 devices, auto-onboarding is supported, while other nRF91 Series devices follow a guided onboarding flow (Nordic provides utilities for this as well). For Bluetooth LE devices on the nRF52, nRF53, or nRF54 Series, the Memfault SDK integration handles the connection setup with minimal configuration required.
Device management and data visualization
On successful onboarding of the device, you should see it in the device management window like in figure 1. There you can rename the device, group multiple devices together for easier fleet management, visualize and chart data the device is sending, send downlinks etc. Nordic also provides bulk onboarding service where you can easily onboard your whole fleet of devices in one go. There, you can view and analyze all the important data needed to assess the device’s health, such as network and connection information, battery status, and location data.
You can choose which data to visualize using the Manage Cards option, which lets you control which charts are displayed. For example, figure 2 shows humidity data plotted in a chart alongside the raw JSON messages sent by our custom application running on an nRF9160 development kit.
When you are ready to move beyond the free tier, the Pro tier starts at $0.10 per device per month with pay-as-you-go pricing, OTA updates included, and usage-based charges for observability operations. Enterprise plans with fixed annual pricing are available for production deployments. The pricing model is designed to scale with you, there is no large upfront commitment, and you only pay for what you use.
FOTA
In any IoT deployment, the ability to update firmware remotely is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Devices ship into the field; environments change, vulnerabilities are discovered, and new features are needed. Without FOTA, each of these scenarios means a costly, time-consuming, and often impractical physical intervention. nRF Cloud’s FOTA infrastructure eliminates that problem entirely, providing a secure, streamlined, and production-tested update pipeline across Nordic’s entire hardware portfolio.
Here is how the FOTA process flows, from the developer’s workbench to the device in the field:
The layered security model protects every stage of the process. Firmware images are signed using SDK’s internal tools before they ever leave the developer’s machine. The signature is cryptographically bound to the image content which prevents any malicious attempts to tamper with the device’s firmware.
How does nRF Cloud compare to alternatives?
nRF Cloud vs AWS IoT Core vs Azure IoT Hub
AWS IoT Core is a data ingestion service that provides secure, bi-directional communication for IoT devices using protocols such as MQTT or HTTPS and has the largest portfolio of IoT-focused cloud services.
However, this breadth comes with significant cost in terms of complexity. Pricing models can be complex, with charges based on connectivity, messaging, device shadow usage, etc. nRF Cloud, by contrast, bundles all of these capabilities; device management, FOTA, observability, security services, and location, into a single, cohesive platform that works out of the box with Nordic hardware.
nRF Cloud was built from the ground up with power efficiency in mind, which matters enormously for battery-operated devices in the field. Azure IoT Hub serves as the central messaging hub for bidirectional communication between IoT applications and devices, supporting multiple protocols and handling billions of devices with a guaranteed 99.9% connectivity SLA.
Azure is more suited for organisations already deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem.
nRF Cloud vs Generic IoT Platforms
There are also several hardware-adjacent IoT platforms, such as Particle or Hologram, that take a similar “chip-to-cloud” philosophy to nRF Cloud.
These platforms are optimised for their own hardware and offer integrated connectivity management, OTA, and device management. The key differentiator here is depth of observability and security.
With the Memfault integration, nRF Cloud now offers a level of embedded diagnostics, such as crash symbolization, coredump capture, heartbeat metrics, and reboot tracking that generic platforms simply do not provide.
nRF Cloud: A Practical Choice
nRF Cloud stands out as a genuinely purpose-built IoT platform rather than a generic cloud service retrofitted for embedded devices. From the moment you create an account, the path to a connected, production-ready device is remarkably short, Nordic’s nRF Connect SDK ships with ready-to-run samples that handle the heavy lifting of cloud communication, letting developers focus on their application logic rather than wrestling with transport protocols or authentication boilerplate.
One of the most important aspects of IoT is power management to ensure that battery powered devices can run for years continuously. That is what makes nRF Cloud stand out because each layer of nRF Cloud reflects the assumption that your device is battery-powered and expected to run for years, not days. Power-saving features like PSM and eDRX are first-class considerations, and the lightweight CoAP transport option means devices spend as little time awake and transmitting as possible.
Security is also a very important aspect for which nRF Cloud provides hardware-rooted device identity, cryptographically signed firmware updates, and lifecycle-spanning protection from commissioning to decommissioning.
The future of IoT belongs to connected products that are secure by design, maintainable over their entire lifetime, and built on infrastructure that developers can trust. That is why nRF Cloud is a practical choice.