https://nagg.eu/tags/industrialos/Recent content in IndustrialOS on nagg.euHugoenWed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://nagg.eu/kubernetes-cluster-for-manufacturing-engineering/Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://nagg.eu/kubernetes-cluster-for-manufacturing-engineering/<p><img src="https://nagg.eu/2019/10/kubernetes-docker-cluster.jpg" alt="kubernetes-docker-cluster"></p> <h3 id="--introduction">- Introduction</h3> <p>A quite big company that produces parts for some of the most important automotive industry companies was interested in a cloud-based system to monitor the overall efficiency of their production machines, analyze some key parameters and optimize the production activities scheduling.<br> Goal of the project was to connect eleven industrial manufacturing machines to the cloud, extract specific machine data and develop a web application for the visualization and management of such data, while guaranteeing information confidentiality and security.<br> Furthermore, one fundamental requirement of such system has been the bidirectional integration with the customer&rsquo;s ERP system, in order to synchronize the production JOBs and manage their execution on the corresponding machines.<br> To fulfill such requirements, the project team has engineered and then implemented an hybrid edge-cloud solution in which the software has been packed into various <strong>containers</strong> that are orchestrated and managed, at the edge level, by a Kubernetes cluster.<br> This technology ensures an optimal load balancing between the available resources as well as a high availability in case of hardware or software failures.<br> While IT enterprises do not question the value of containerized applications anymore, the use of such kind of technologies within a manufacturing environment hasn&rsquo;t been completely explored yet.<br> In the following paragraphs we will go into details on how we engineered and built the system despite all the difficulties we had to overcome.</p>