I have been very impressed with IBM's BlueMix IOT offerings. It took me awhile to get it all workings...partly because their examples had some bugs in them. Now I have my Uno with Ethernet shield uploading MQTT over http://. My shield was only like $6 on eBay and is totally worth it to me. The MQTT library I'm using is written for the Ethernet library. I'm not sure if it would work with 8266.