Industrial IoT Architecture Patterns

Publication date: December 17, 2021 (Document history)

Today, industrial companies want to ingest, store, and analyze IoT data, closer to the point where data is generated to enable predictive maintenance, improve quality control, enhance worker safety, and more. Industrial companies can greatly benefit from the industrial edge’s ability to solve for use cases which require low latency, optimized bandwidth utilization, need for offline or autonomous operation, and adherence to regulatory guidelines. This whitepaper outlines the design considerations for industrial IoT architectures which use the industrial edge.

Introduction

Industrial Edge computing involves hardware and software technologies that enable storage, computing, processing, and networking close to the industrial devices that generates or consumes data within a factory or industrial environment. While Edge computing moves compute closer to the data generation source, the edge can range from device hardware to edge gateways to local nodes to cell tower nodes to local data centers. This whitepaper focuses on industrial IoT use cases where edge gateways are placed in a stationary location in an industrial environment and play the role of intermediary between on premise Operational Technology (OT) systems and the cloud and catalog common industrial edge architecture patterns to provide prescriptive guidance to customers implementing industrial IoT systems. Edge gateways fill the critical role of intermediary processing nodes and integrator between industrial assets and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, and is heavily influenced by edge computing imperatives. In cases where OT systems are not capable of supporting authentication, authorization, and encryption techniques, the edge gateway can act as a guardian to locally interface with these less-capable systems, bridging them to cloud services with strong security patterns. The following section reviews edge computing imperatives.