Summary

The overall focus of this book is implementing Industrial IoT and leveraging AWS cloud technology to achieve the goal of digitalization of your industry and environment. This chapter was designed to set the stage and provide a basic understanding of Industry 4.0, including its purpose and a view into the road ahead, helping you to have a better understanding of the end vision. A strong roadmap and vision, guided by business goals and coordinated with operations and production teams, can help you stay on track and ensure that everyone buys into the process.

In the coming chapters, we will focus on more technical details of how to achieve some of those goals toward instrumenting, collecting, and using data within your environment. This is the fun part of the process for IT geeks who are interested in learning and using new technology. The advent of IoT has opened the availability of hardware to software engineers who don’t always have the opportunity to work with both. Hardware, software, networking, and analytics are now considered the full stack of most IoT engineers and open up new opportunities for interesting solutions in the industrial space.

In the next chapter, we will outline our overall architecture planning approach. We will describe the main architecture levels and key components to build a successful and scalable Industrial IoT platform. Starting with the basics will provide a starting point for adapting some useful architecture concepts to your environment as you initiate or continue your IoT journey. We will also talk about the roles of the IT architect and different types of architect roles and discuss how you can add the most benefit to the project’s success.

For now, grab a cup of coffee, sit in your favorite chair, and enjoy!