Samsung Electronics announced the commercial availability of Artik Cloud, an open data exchange platform designed to provide connectivity to IoT devices and applications.

Unveiled at the Samsung Developer Conference, the cloud service is underpinned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and marks the company’s first entry into the cloud services market.

It provides the backend capability to complement its current IoT product range of Artik microcontrollers and SmartThings devices, and brings the company closer to its goal of becoming an end-to-end IoT solutions provider, Samsung said.

While AWS already possesses an IoT platform, Samsung claims its service allows developers to more quickly connect IoT devices together with its open APIs and hardware-agnostic capabilities.

Artik Cloud supports multiple device connector protocols, such as REST/HTTP, Websockets, MQTT and CoAP, and also provides cloud connectors to interface and collect data from any other cloud service used by its customers, the company said.

The product also supports a wide range of SDKs, including Objective C / iOS, Java / Android, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, and C#; as well as Tizen 3.0 when it is released.

Developers are able to start working with the service for free, with a tiered, pay-as-you-go payment model also available.