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LESSON

Cloud Edition Overview


Length: 3:05 min

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Description

Learn what makes Cloud Edition different from a Standard Edition and where it fits in.

Video recorded using: Ignition 8.1

Transcript

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[00:00] Cloud Edition differentiates itself from a standard Ignition installation by being an easy way to integrate Ignition into a cloud deployment. There are many reasons one might look to deploy a solution on the cloud. For example, cost and convenience. As you probably know, deploying a solution on premises, or on-prem, means that you're responsible for the physical location of your hardware, including any costs related to that space. You set up the actual hardware and infrastructure, and you pay for the upkeep and maintenance of them. Alternatively, platforms like AWS or Microsoft Azure will host servers for you on the cloud. These companies handle all the maintenance and infrastructure burdens allowing you to access the solution simply with an internet connection. From there, you would only be responsible for things like your application code, identity management, and network traffic. With a cloud deployment, you get the convenience of someone else handling the hardware, and you can take advantage of powerful, highly available, highly scalable services, that AWS and Azure offer. To illustrate this, let's take a look at an example of Ignition deployed in a standard AWS architecture.

[01:11] This deployment uses a virtual private cloud with public and private subnets. It expands across two availability zones for high availability. It uses Linux Bastion hosts in an auto-scaling group to connect resources within the private and public subnets. It provides an Amazon Aurora DB cluster for read and write operations, and it takes advantage of encryption, alarming, and notification services for the AWS resources as well. Since Ignition is hosted within this environment, it benefits from the AWS managed resources. While you can spin up a virtual machine on a cloud platform and install the standard edition of Ignition, Cloud Edition makes this process much simpler. First of all, Cloud Edition is available through the cloud vendors themselves. For example, you can use an Ignition Cloud Edition AMI from the AWS Marketplace to easily create a virtual machine with Ignition pre-loaded and ready to go. On top of this Cloud Edition is bought through the marketplaces themselves, like other cloud services.

[02:08] There is no startup cost and it's instead paid for by usage. Cloud Edition will also come with a fixed set of modules, such as our new cloud connector modules that will help create connections to commonly used cloud technologies like MongoDB and Kafka. One important difference with the included modules is that Cloud edition will not come with the OPC UA drivers. This is intentional. It's not advised to connect directly to PLCs or other industrial devices due to security reasons. These distinctions are what make Ignition in the cloud unique. It's not intended as replacement for on-prem Ignition setups. Since these solutions will still be preferable for controls and data acquisition. However, Cloud Edition provides a much simpler way to create a hybrid solution with both on-prem and cloud deployments to take advantage of availability, computing, storage, and various other services offered by cloud platforms.

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