Driving Industry 4.0 at Distributed Edges with Cloud Orchestration
A typical process for Edge Lifecycle Management is shown in Figure 6 . The process can be structured in three lifecycle phases for an edge node : The onboarding phase , the operations phase and the decommission phase . During the onboarding phase Edge Lifecycle Management ( EdgeLM ) enables customers to register their newly received node from their hardware as a service provider in their customer tenant to make it operational .
In the operations phase EdgeLM provides central software lifecycle management capabilities including deploy , update , or remove containerized applications . It also enables monitoring of edge nodes and provides central logging capabilities . The customer factory manager can also locally perform emergency operations ( start / stop ) on the edge and can influence the scheduling when local updates are performed . When the decommission phase is reached , i . e ., a customer decides to retire an edge node and cancel his hardware as a service subscription , EdgeLM offers capabilities to safely unregister the node from his cloud tenant .
Fig . 6 - Phases of Edge Lifecycle Management .
Industry standards and open source driving the adoption of edge computing . As shown in the previous sections , many Industry 4.0 scenarios require interoperability and connectivity between assets and equipment on the shop floor as well as their interfaces to the overlaying edge-cloud infrastructure . Also , higher acceptance of new technologies as well as lower integration and operational costs are impacting the success of Industry 4.0 solutions in the market . Therefore , industry standards as well as open source driving de-facto standards are an imperative in modern edge computing architectures and are discussed in this section .
Examples of industry standards providing interoperability and connectivity for edge computing architectures are :
- Asset - Edge Connectivity : OPC-UA , MQTT , AMQP , DDS , REST , Modbus , WebSocket .
- Edge - Cloud Connectivity : REST , MQTT , AMQP , Apache Kafka , WebSocket . Most of standards mentioned above are simultaneously being developed in standardization groups and realized within open source projects ( page 86 , Figure 27 of [ 24 ]). As discussed in [ 25 ], this trend leverages the potentials of open source , makes standardization more agile and transparent , and drives the adoption of new technologies . Examples are OASIS standards such as
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