AWS CloudFormation enables end users to automate and standardize infrastructure deployment, helping ensure consistent AWS resource provisioning for AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT TwinMaker, and other supporting services. This helps you minimize manual errors and operational drift for simulation and brewery demonstration environments. GitHub streamlines code changes and responses to events with features like GitHub Actions and near-real-time notifications. Together, CloudFormation and GitHub bolster operational excellence by automating workflows, swiftly reacting to system events, and maintaining standardized operations.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows precise control over user and service permissions to permit only authorized access to resources and to maintain data confidentiality and integrity. IAM roles allow access from Grafana on the AWS IoT TwinMaker Workspace that are in line with the AWS IoT TwinMaker service documentation. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for simulation are assigned an IAM instance role with access to AWS Systems Manager to support up-to-date patching. Systems Manager provides tools for consistent configuration management, patching, and auditing of resources, enhancing system and data protection. IAM and Systems Manager bolster security by offering granular access controls and a suite of management tools to detect and respond to security events.

With AWS IoT SiteWise and AWS IoT TwinMaker, throttling limits are in place for data ingress and egress to assure continued operation. With the Managed Grafana console, you’ll have access to a workspace to visualize and analyze metrics, logs, and traces without having to build, package, or deploy any hardware or infrastructure. Managed Grafana automatically provisions, configures, and manages the operations of the workspace with automatic version upgrades. The service auto scales to meet dynamic usage demands. This is critical for handling peak usage during site operations or the start of a shift for industrial operations. As part of this Guidance, a self-managed Grafana instance is used for testing purposes.

This architecture enables organizations to scale the deployment of their industrial digital twins across multiple sites within throttling limits. AWS Regions are configurable in the CloudFormation templates, supporting global deployments where data sovereignty requirements exist. As the number of connected assets grow, the architecture can help assure that it will scale with this growth and remain performant.

With AWS IoT SiteWise, you can apply a deadband to your OPC-UA source property groups to filter out and discard certain data instead of sending it to the AWS Cloud. A deadband specifies a window of expected fluctuations in the incoming data values from your OPC-UA source. If the values fall within this window, your OPC-UA server won't send it to the AWS Cloud. You can use deadband filtering to reduce the amount of data you're processing and sending to the AWS Cloud.

In addition, the AWS IoT SiteWise cold tier uses Apache Parquet format in Amazon S3. It is an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval.