AWS for Industries
Globalizing Smart Manufacturing’s Boundless Potential with AWS Outposts
Introduction:
In today’s manufacturing landscape, organizations are integrating artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. These technologies help improve efficiency, quality control, and innovation across various manufacturing processes. By using real-time data, predictive analytics, and automation, manufacturers can increase productivity and competitiveness in the global market.
However, adopting new manufacturing technologies presents key challenges. Many industrial applications need ultra-low latency data and computing that traditional cloud architectures struggle to provide. This is particularly important in smart factories and predictive maintenance use cases, where sensors generate large volumes of real-time data. Using centralized cloud solutions alone can introduce latencies that affect time-sensitive operations and decisions. Data security regulations across jurisdictions require protection for sensitive production data. Data sovereignty also requires careful management of data storage and processing across regions. Additionally, sending data to remote data centers may not meet data residency requirements in certain industries or regions.
AWS Outposts addresses these challenges as a hybrid cloud solution. It brings AWS infrastructure and services on-premises, enabling manufacturers to run latency-sensitive applications locally while meeting data sovereignty requirements. Manufacturers can run critical workloads on-site, maintaining data control, and use AWS cloud scalability, management, and services. This hybrid approach provides the flexibility to use cloud capabilities where suitable while keeping sensitive data on-premises when required by regulations or performance needs. As manufacturing technology advances, hybrid solutions like AWS Outposts help manufacturers use advanced technologies to improve efficiency and innovation. In this blog, we will explore the challenges of traditional on-premise infrastructure, how manufacturers can use AWS Outposts to optimize on-premise workloads, and how it can reduce costs and speed time to market.
Challenges of traditional on-premises infrastructure
Manufacturing organizations face several challenges with traditional on-premises infrastructure. Scalability limitations present challenges as companies work to adjust their capacity to meet fluctuating demands, often resulting in costly hardware expansions and resource underutilization. The burden of maintenance and management adds complexity, requiring dedicated IT personnel to handle system updates, patch management, and coordination of diverse technological systems. Disaster recovery and business continuity are concerns, with organizations investing in redundant systems while addressing challenges of ensuring recovery and minimal operational disruptions. The infrastructure’s limited flexibility affects business operations, leading to slower deployment cycles for new applications and services, difficulties in supporting remote work arrangements, and reduced ability to adapt to market conditions. Moreover, these traditional setups limit innovation. Organizations find it challenging to experiment with new technologies, face challenges in rapid prototyping and testing of advanced manufacturing solutions, and may lag behind in adopting industry best practices and standards. These limitations affect their competitive edge and ability to drive technological advancement in the manufacturing sector.
Hybrid edge solution with AWS Outposts for globalizing smart manufacturing
The hybrid edge solution with AWS Outposts helps to increase the agility and resilience of your operations to meet rising customer demand and reduce the time for new applications to production lines. You can implement the solution in these three phases:
Phase 1: Full Cloud Architecture for application functionality and integration verification
Before ordering or receiving AWS Outposts, you can verify the application functionality and integration by establishing the Development, Quality Assurance, and Production stages in an AWS Region. You can do this with the consistent resources and an operational interface across AWS Regions and AWS Outposts, which helps expedite the process of application deployment on AWS Outposts and delivering the application to production lines.
Phase 2: Hybrid Edge Architecture to meet low latency requirements
When AWS Outposts arrives at your site, you can move latency-sensitive workloads such as Shop Floor Control Systems (SFCS), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and Automation and AI/ML applications for production stage to AWS Outposts, while integrating with AWS Region environments. This hybrid edge architecture enables manufacturers to use the scalability, agility, and AWS services while addressing low latency requirements.
Phase 3: Ensuring Business Continuity with AWS Outposts Disaster Recovery
Maintaining operations is paramount in smart manufacturing, where downtime can result in significant financial losses and disruptions. AWS Outposts provides disaster recovery through AWS Backup and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, allowing you to backup and replicate critical workloads to an AWS Region or other AWS Outposts. If an AWS Outposts failure occurs, traffic can transfer to the AWS Cloud or other AWS Outposts, helping maintain business continuity and minimizing the operational disruptions.
The following diagram shows an example hybrid edge reference architecture of how you can use AWS Outposts with AWS Region services for Globalizing Smart Manufacturing:
- The factory application users and devices, or power distribution unit (PDUs) connect to Application Load Balancer and Amazon EC2 on AWS Outposts through a Local Gateway in the Intranet for latency-sensitive workloads like SFCS, MES, Automation and AI/ML real time data inference. Then, they connect to AWS Region for non-latency sensitive workloads such as Office automation (OA) system through AWS Direct Connect or AWS Site-to-Site VPN over the Internet.
- Applications deployed on AWS Outposts EC2 can connect to AWS Region services through Service Link, which connects your AWS Outposts and your chosen AWS Region. This allows for the management of the Outposts and the exchange of traffic to and from the AWS Region.
- The AI/ML applications and models deployed on AWS IoT Greengrass on AWS Outposts EC2 can consume data locally, enabling real time abnormal detection of the PDUs data, which are transmitted to AWS IoT SiteWise for continuous monitoring and are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for model retraining by Amazon SageMaker.
- If an AWS Outposts failure occurs, factory traffic can transfer with Domain Name System (DNS) to the disaster recovery site in AWS Region, helping maintain business continuity and minimize the operational disruptions.
Figure 1: Hybrid edge reference architecture of AWS Outposts
Key design considerations for production workloads reliability
Due to the high availability requirement of production workloads, you can provision additional built-in and active capacity in AWS Outposts and disaster recovery sites to enable recovery and failover if correlated failures occur. To ensure high availability, you can add host capacity by implementing N+1 hosts in AWS Outposts for Amazon EC2 host failover. For additional network capacity, you can establish two service links from AWS Outposts to an AWS Region for network failover capabilities. Also, if an AWS Outposts, network, or site failure occurs, factory traffic can transfer to an AWS Region or other AWS Outposts, helping maintain business continuity and minimize the operational disruptions.
Supporting smart manufacturing initiatives with AWS Outposts
Companies providing cloud infrastructure and network products, such as Wiwynn and Accton, use AWS Outposts for their smart manufacturing initiatives. With operating bases across regions, manufacturers need expanded production footprints to support local growth while requiring low-latency access globally.
At the 2023 re:Invent, Taipei summit and 2024 re:Invent, Accton implemented AWS Outposts to bridge hybrid OT and IT to rollout AI/ML services globally. Wiwynn implemented AWS Outposts and delivered production environments 10 months ahead of schedule while reducing the deployment time for its new Malaysia factory by 90%, requiring one-eight of the original IT system management staff.
AWS Outposts offers three key advantages for smart manufacturing initiatives: low latencies, faster time to market, and consistent hybrid experience. Customers can achieve latencies below 5 milliseconds for latency-sensitive workloads, enabling real-time operations and analysis. You can install AWS Outposts and deploy applications within one week, helping you quickly respond to business opportunities and market demands. By using AWS Outposts and AWS global cloud infrastructure, you can achieve rapid, cost-effective, flexible, and secure global deployments, providing a consistent hybrid experience and helping accelerate smart factory expansion worldwide.
Conclusion:
AWS Outposts helps manufacturers globalize their smart manufacturing initiatives, speed up the process of establishing new factories or applications, reducing operational and staff costs through unified hybrid cloud solutions and centralized management, and providing resilience for low-latency factory operations and flexibility to accommodate diverse requirements.
Consider using AWS Outposts when planning to establish new factories, introducing new applications or retiring legacy hardware, and when addressing pain points related to staff shortages, local partner availability, or management complexities.
By using AWS Outposts, manufacturers can implement smart manufacturing capabilities such as predictive maintenance, quality improvement, and process optimization, to help drive innovation, production efficiency, and global competitiveness.