SDK
A software development kit: libraries, tools, samples and documentation that let developers build against a platform or hardware without starting from scratch.
IoT SDKs come in two flavors. Device SDKs run on the hardware and handle the hard parts of connecting to a platform: TLS, certificate handling, MQTT sessions, reconnection with backoff and message formatting. Cloud or application SDKs wrap the platform’s API in a language such as Python or JavaScript so backend developers can query devices and subscribe to events with a few calls.
Using the vendor SDK speeds up the first prototype but ties the firmware to that vendor’s conventions, which matters if the platform might change. Silicon vendors also ship SDKs for their chips, covering drivers, radio stacks and power management, and the quality of that SDK is often a stronger reason to pick a microcontroller than the datasheet figures.
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