Welcome to the IoT Revolution
This book is designed for architects and industrial engineers looking for guidance in moving into IoT or the Industry 4.0 space, offering some ideas, approaches, goals, and advice to help make your way forward a little easier and more successful. For readers new to IT architecture or the IoT space, we aim to help answer many of those initial questions or at least guide you in asking the right questions. We want to set the stage in these initial chapters before we get too deep into the technical details. Anyone new to these topics should benefit from these initial chapters, especially non-technical stakeholders who want to understand the why and how of Industrial IoT. With this in mind, please consider that we are providing historical and architectural background, guidance, and some best practices, from an IT and system development approach. If things get too technical, you have been warned.
In this chapter, we want to set the stage for understanding Industry 4.0 and help you to understand where it is headed and why it is important. We are going to review why the current Industrial Revolution and Industry 4.0 are so important, know where we are in the current state of technology, and learn how you can build your vision and value statement for driving technologies such as IoT into your organization.
We are going to cover the following main topics:
- Industry 4.0 and the digitalization of industry
- How IoT can support Industry 4.0 at scale
- The convergence – IT, OT, and management working together
- Leveraging good architecture to drive progress
In future chapters, we will delve much deeper into the how of Industrial IoT and learn how to implement and use some of this exciting technology, but stay with us. We need to understand some of the history better and discover where it all started. We have also chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the hyperscaler of choice to base our practical examples. AWS is a formidable player in this space and has a great product roadmap and vision associated with Industrial IoT. There will be more about this as we progress across chapters.
