Roadmap › Industry 4.0 & IIoT — Smart Manufacturing Software › Module: IIoT Architecture and Protocols
Lessons in this course (10)
3. IIoT reference architecture — device, edge, cloud
Intermediate★ Must knowLesson 3 of 10
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Machines/PLCs ──OPC UA/Modbus──► Edge gateway (filter, buffer, compute) ──MQTT/AMQP/HTTPS──►
Cloud ingestion (IoT Hub / Event Hubs / MQTT broker) ──► Stream processing (rules, aggregates)
├─► Hot path: real-time dashboards & alerts (SignalR, Grafana)
├─► Warm path: time-series store (ADX, InfluxDB, PI) for trends & OEE
└─► Cold path: data lake / warehouse for ML and reporting
MES / ERP / CMMS integrations ◄──► APIs and eventsEdge vs cloud:
| Edge | Cloud |
|---|---|
| Millisecond-second decisions, works offline | Fleet-wide analytics, long-term storage, ML training |
| Protocol translation, filtering, compression | Integration across plants and with business systems |
| Store-and-forward when the link fails | Elastic scale, managed services |
Design rules: outbound-only connections from OT to cloud, device identity with certificates, buffering at the edge, source timestamps in UTC, data quality flags, a consistent naming model, and data contracts versioned like APIs.