Industrial IoT at Scale: What’s Really Needed

[Ramon Fernandes]

Sending data to the cloud is becoming increasingly ubiquitous for consumers and smaller companies. Larger companies even embrace the cloud for more and more of their IT operations. But in the industrial world, the cloud can still be a dirty word. That's why there is so much emphasis on edge computing where sensor or device data is sent to a gateway somewhere on the premise for computing and analysis. This article breaks down why cloud computing falls short in supporting certain businesses, which I imagine will just make engineers more eager to figure out ways around these problems.

https://www.rtinsights.com/industrial-iot-at-scale-what-is-really-needed/

[Heath Raftery]

Some good points made there. Probably won't surprise any engineers to find that not all screwdrivers fit all screws. But yes, in the hype-driven business decision making world we live in, there are many examples of trying to use a screwdriver to hammer a nail.

I'd go as far as to say the challenge is not to "figure out ways around these problems", because that assumes the fallacy that, for example, "edge" computing is a novel invention from the cloud era. In reality, processing has always been done at the edge, and cloud computing paradigms simply mean we need a term to describe the adoption of legacy paradigms.

I'd prefer to frame the challenge as doing our due diligence on the applicability of new tools. If cloud does not provide net benefit, then the solution is not to adopt it. In reality, there are likely to be aspects that can benefit from new technology, and so the challenge is to astutely adopt aspects of new technology that provide net benefit.

I get a little tired of the one-size fits all hype, that then hyper-hypes accommodations that are simply existing techniques wrapped up in new lingo. You see this a lot, for example, in web development frameworks. Every few years all the problems are re-solved, only to reveal a different set of issues that had already been solved.