Profiling Soracom — 18 APIs and a Connectivity Control Plane

Soracom carries 18 APIs, and it’s one of the cleanest examples in the catalog of a company that turned a physical thing — a cellular SIM — into a fully programmable cloud platform. The surface is what you get when connectivity itself becomes an API.

What’s actually in the surface

The 18 APIs decompose the lifecycle of a connected device:

The SIM control plane — SIM Management, Group Configuration, Auth and Access Management, Billing, Stats and Diagnostics. Provision, group, secure, and bill the fleet.
The data plane — Harvest (managed time-series store for device payloads), Analysis and Query (columnar SQL over session, location, and usage history), Lagoon (managed dashboards).
Device operations — Inventory (LwM2M device management), Napter (on-demand secure remote access into a SIM-attached device), Event Handler, Batch.
Network fabric — Virtual Private Gateway (VPC peering, Direct Connect, IPSec into your cloud), plus Air for LoRaWAN and Air for Sigfox for non-cellular LPWAN.

What’s interesting about the shape

Connectivity is decomposed into composable cloud services. Beyond the raw SIM, Soracom’s platform (surfaced across these APIs) breaks the data path into named services: Beam terminates TLS in the cloud, Funnel forwards payloads to Kinesis or Pub/Sub, Funk invokes Lambda from a device, Orbit runs WebAssembly transforms inline. The device stays dumb; the intelligence lives in the connectivity layer.
A dedicated Sandbox API. Soracom Sandbox API gives you a safe environment to build against before touching real SIMs and real cellular billing. Shipping a sandbox as a first-class API is a maturity signal most providers skip.
The CLI is generated from the spec. The soracom command-line tool is auto-generated from the OpenAPI definition — the contract isn’t documentation-after-the-fact, it’s the source the tooling is built from.
Napter is remote access as an API. On-demand secure port mapping into a device behind a cellular NAT, granted and revoked through a call. That’s a genuinely hard networking problem exposed as a simple resource.

The takeaway

Eighteen APIs is what “connectivity as a platform” looks like when it’s done properly: the SIM is the anchor, but the value is the control plane, the data store, and the network fabric wrapped around it. The pattern to borrow — if your product has a physical component, the API isn’t an afterthought bolted on; it’s the layer that makes the hardware composable. Walk the full surface on the Soracom provider page.