What criteria should be used to decide if ignition can be run in the cloud?

Ignition
1

hi All
I wonder if you could please share your criteria when deciding whether ignition can be run on the cloud?
I understand the licence could become an issue if the cloud server fingerprint changes.
What else shall be considered eg. the process does not need real time interaction but rather IT type of tasks like reports etc.
Can Ignition run on any cloud provider?

2

Latency. If working direct from the cloud OPC-UA to PLCs' on your site, this is not recommended. You should have a local OPC-UA/MQTT (Ignition) on the site forwarding to the cloud.

3 Likes
3

yep i agree - no device connections to the cloud ignition server.
Anything else?

4

Financial costs for hosting in the cloud should be considered. It's more upfront cost to buy an actual computer to host your Ignition but over a long enough time the cloud hosting will cost you more.

1 Like
5

This, but also avoid closing even slower control loops though the cloud. Any control interactions that need to work in the seconds-to-minutes time frame should be a local server. Supervisory controls and ERP interfaces that work on the minutes-to-hours time frame could reasonably be deployed in the cloud.

ERP functionality that originates in the cloud but needs to transfer to PLCs with short latencies should be loaded into site-local servers ahead of the need. IMNSHO.

1 Like
6

i wonder if any cloud providers are preferred for automation projects for whatever reason ? (lets assume all of them have the same price and the latency)

7

Well, Inductive has a cloud partner solution: 4IR Solutions | Solution Partner with Inductive Automation

Personally, I have an instance in AWS. It's just bog-standard Ignition though.

8

We're actively working on a new "Cloud Edition" with some special features to take advantage of different cloud providers. Expect news soon.

5 Likes