I'm designing a board with a small (8-bit) MCU onboard. Its job is to control a bunch of I/O and PWM signals, but does not handle any high-level connectivity but UARTs.
It is required to have a WiFi connection to the Cloud (AWS via MQTT) that can be easily achieved using any ESP8266-based module, that exchange data with the MCU using a serial line.
Now the boss also want an Ethernet connection, as alternative to WiFi. I cannot find an Arduino-based module (to re-use most of the code) to act as an Ethernet gateway (like the ESP8266 module does).
I found only expensive and large Arduino boards with their shields, but not a simple stand-alone and programmable object with the secure-Ethernet Arduino libraries.
Any recommendations? I'm pretty sure most of IoT devices require more than WiFi only connection.