Cloud Models and Its Relevance in the Context
The Cloud Computing services provide the flexible, on-demand, and hosted resources pool delivered on the Internet. The Cloud offers the ready to use services with minimal intervention either in the private or secured public and hybrid models. The broad network access to more comprehensive services, resource pooling on demand like computing, memory, storage, networking, and access to the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) through the Cloud makes it more suitable to adopt in the Manufacturing industry and Industrial Automation enabled with the sensor based Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The Cloud provides the rapid elasticity feature which scales up and down with an inevitable rise and fall of the demand of the resources in the Manufacturing industry. It has measured service, i.e., metered usage and billing that provides the pay-as-you-go and only for actual utilization, i.e., to reduce the operational expenditure (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX).
The basic Cloud models like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) & Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are entirely useful in the manufacturing industry at the various stages in the manufacturing process. The taxonomy of the Cloud-based services listed as in figure 1. The Manufacturing Cloud (CMfg) addresses the challenges and integrates the various software on the Cloud which reduces the overall cost in terms of OPEX and CAPEX. The Cloud-based services provided for simplifying the manufacturing processes through the information technology supported infrastructure in the Cloud-based services either through the public, private or hybrid type of methodologies.
The Cloud provides scalable and flexible support, in the various stages of the manufacturing processes and resource sharing. One can look towards the CMfg as the various software services provided in the Cloud environment, related to the manufacturing process. Whereas, it is a broad area to ensure the manufacturing services and shared resources not only in the form of software but also the integration of the various resources, availability, efficiency, affordability securely and systematically. The involvement of the data transfer techniques, tools and protocols play a crucial role such as in the IIoT. The economics of providing all these services through the Cloud platform is very much pragmatic and mostly does not add any cost in the finished product and reduces the overall cost of the manufacturing. The under-utilized capacity of the manufacturing assets can available on a rental basis, through the Cloud-based integration. The scalability issue of the CMfg can be easily solved due to the various scalability, elasticity and Cloud Bursting features of the Cloud. (Lartigau, Nie, Xu, Zhan & Mou, 2012) & (Rath, 2018).
The Virtualization Technology (VT) enables the use of costly product simulation, design and modeling software on a rental basis in the Cloud environment. Due to the pay-as-you-go model of the Cloud, the manufacturer does not have to pay a lot, as compared with buying the license copy of the software and bare-metal hardware to run the simulation software. Like running simulation of the products on the HPC enabled Cloud infrastructure. The IT team of the manufacturer and engineers can create the private Cloud in their premises and can extend it to the public Cloud services to utilize the compute cycles from the virtual cluster with lambda services like Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) also known as serverless computing (AWS, 2019). Cloud adoption gives immense flexibility for various tasks in the automation of the manufacturing industry.