Apache Kafka as Data Historian: An IIoT/Industry 4.0 Real-Time Data Lake

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'Data Historian' is a well-known concept in Industrial IoT (IIoT). It helps to ensure and improve the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

Data Historian has a lot in common with other industrial trends like a digital twin or data lake: It is ambiguous; there is more than one definition. "Process Historian" or "Operational Historian" are synonyms. "Enterprise Historian" is similar but is more on an enterprise-level (plant or global infrastructure), while the "Operational Historian" is closer to the edge. Historian software is often embedded or used in conjunction with standard DCS and PLC control systems.

The following is inspired by the articles "What is a Data Historian?" from Automated Results and "Operational Historian vs. Enterprise Historian: What’s the Difference?" from Parasyn — two expert companies in the Industrial IoT space.

This blog post explores the relationship between a data historian and event streaming, and why Apache Kafka might become a part of your Data Historian 4.0. This also requires the discussion if a Data Historian 4.0 is operational, enterprise-level, or a mixture of both. As you can imagine, there is no single answer to this question...

Kafka as Data Historian != Replacement of Other Data Storage, Databases or Data Lakes

Just a short note before we get started: The idea is NOT to use Kafka as single, allrounder database and replace your favorite data storage! No worries :-) Check out the following blog post for more thoughts on this discussion:

https://www.kai-waehner.de/blog/2020/03/12/can-apache-kafka-replace-database-acid-storage-transactions-sql-nosql-data-lake/

Use Cases for a Data Historian in Industrial IoT (IIoT)

There are many uses for a Data Historian in different industries. The following is a shameless copy and paste from Automated Results's article:

Before we talk about the capabilities of a data historian, let's first think of why this concept exists...

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) "is the gold standard for measuring manufacturing productivity. Simply put, it identifies the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive. An OEE score of 100% means you are manufacturing only Good Parts, as fast as possible, with no Stop Time. In the language of OEE that means 100% quality, 100% performance (as fast as possible), and 100% availability (no stop time)."

One of the major goals of OEE programs is to reduce and/or eliminate the most common causes of equipment-based productivity loss in manufacturing (called the Six Big Losses):

OEE - Six Big Losses

How does a Data Historian help to reduce and/or eliminating the Sig Big Losses?

Capabilities of a Data Historian

A Data Historian supports ensuring and improving the OEE:

A data historian contains the following key components to help to implement factory automation and process automation:

These features are often very limited and proprietary in a traditional data historian. Therefore, Kafka might be a good option for parts of this; as we see later in this post.

Before I map these requirements to Kafka-based infrastructure, let's think about the relation and difference between OT, IT, and Industry 4.0. We need to understand why there is so much demand to change from traditional Data Historians to modern, open, scalable IoT architectures...

The Evolution of IT-OT Convergence

For many decades, the automation industry was used to proprietary technologies, monoliths, no or very limited network connectivity, and no or very limited security enforcement (meaning authentication, authorization, and encryption, NOT meaning safety, which actually is in place and crucial).

The evolution of convergence between IT (i.e. software and information technology) and OT (i.e. factories, machines and industrial automation) is changing this:

Evolution of Convergence between IT and Industrial Automation OT

Let's thinks about this convergence in more details from a simplified point of view:

OT => Uptime

OT's main interest is uptime. Typically 99.999+%. Operations teams are not "that much" interested in fast turnaround times. Their incentive is to keep the production lines running for 10+ years without changes or downtime.

IT => Business Value

IT's main interest is business value. In the last decade, microservices, DevOps, CI/CD, and other agile paradigms created a new way of thinking. Originated at the Silicon Valley tech giants with millions of users and petabytes of data, this is now the new normal in any industry. Yes, even in automation industry (even though you don't want to update the software of a production line on a daily basis). This is where "Industry 4.0" and similar terms come into play...

Industry 4.0 => OT + IT

Industry 4.0 is converging OT and IT. This digital transformation is asking for new characteristics of hardware and software:

In 2020, the above points are normal in IT in many projects. Cloud-native infrastructures, agile DevOps, and CI/CD are used more and more to be competitive and/or innovative.

Unfortunately, we are still in very early stages in OT. At least, we are getting some open standards like OPC-UA for vendor-neutral communication.

Shop Floor, Top Floor, Data Center, Cloud, Mobile, Partner...

The more data is integrated and correlated, the more business value can be achieved. Due to this, the convergence of OT and IT goes far beyond the shop floor and top floor. The rest of the enterprise IT architecture gets relevant, too. This can be software running in your data center or the public cloud.

Hybrid architectures become more and more common. Integration with third-party applications enable quick innovation and differentiation while building sophisticated partnerships with other vendors and service providers.

As you can see, achieving industry revolution 4.0 requires some new capabilities. This is where Event Streaming and Apache Kafka come into play.

Apache Kafka and Event Streaming in Automation Industry/IIoT

Apache Kafka can help to reduce and or eliminate the Sig Big Losses in manufacturing by providing data ingestion, processing, storage, and analytics in real-time at scale without downtime.

I won't cover in detail what Apache Kafka is and why people use it a lot in the automation industry and Industry 4.0 projects. I covered this in several posts, already:

Please note that Apache Kafka is not the allrounder for every problem. The above posts describe when, why, and how to complement it with other IoT platforms and frameworks, and how to combine it with existing legacy data historians, proprietary protocols, DCS, SCADA, MES, ERP, and other industrial and non-industrial systems.

10 Reasons for Event Streaming With Apache Kafka in IIoT Initiatives

Why is Kafka a perfect fit for IIoT projects? Here you go with the top 10 arguments I heard from project teams in the automation industry:

Even several well-known vendors in this space use Kafka for their internal projects instead of internal IIoT products. Often, IIoT platforms have OEM'd several different legacy platforms for middleware, analytics. and other components. This embedded zoo of technologies does not solve the requirements of IIoT projects in the year 2020.

Architecture: Kafka as Data Historian 4.0

The following architecture shows one possible option to build a data historian with Kafka:

Apache Kafka as Data Historian in Industrial IoT IIoT
This is just one sample architecture. Obviously, individual components can be added or removed. For example, existing Data Historians, HMI (Human-Machine-Interface) or SCADA systems, or another IoT platform or stream processing engine can complement or replace existing components.

Remember: Extensibility and flexibility are two key pillars of a successful IIoT project. Unfortunately, many IoT platforms miss these characteristics. Similarly, they often don't provide scalability, elasticity, or high throughput.

I have also seen a few companies building an enterprise data historian using "traditional data lake software stack": Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, NiFi, Hive, and various other data lake technologies. Here, Kafka was just the ingestion layer into HDFS or S3. While it is still valid to build a data lake with this architecture and these technologies, the three main drawbacks are:

  1. The central data storage is data at rest instead of real-time.
  2. A zoo of many complex technologies.
  3. Not applicable for edge deployments due to the zoo of technologies and complex infrastructure and architecture.

I won't go into more detail here; there are always trade-offs for both approaches. With this in mind, let's now go back to the key pillars of a Data Historian in the Industrial IoT and see how these fit to the above architecture.

Data Integration/Data Ingestion

When talking about a data historian or other IoT architectures, some vendors and consultants call this component "data ingestion". I think this is really unfortunate for three reasons:

  1. Data Ingestion often includes many more tasks than just sending data from the data source to the data sink. Think about filtering, enrichment-on-the-fly or type conversion. These things can happen in a separate process, but also as part of the "ingestion".
  2. Data Ingestion means sending data from A to B. But the challenge is not just the data movement, but also the connectivity. Connectors provide the capability to integrate with a data source without complex coding; guaranteeing reliability, fail-over handling and correct event order.
  3. Data Ingestion means you send data from the data source to the data sink. However, in many cases the real value is created when your IoT infrastructure establishes bi-directional integration and communication; not just for analytics and monitoring, but commands command & control, too.

Data Sources

A data historian often has various industrial data sources, such as PLCs, DCS (Distributed Control System), SCADA, MES, ERP, and more. Apache PLC4X, MQTT, or dedicated IIoT  Platforms can be used for data ingestion and integration.

Legacy vs. Standards for Industrial Integration

Legacy integration is still the main focus in 2020, unfortunately: Files, proprietary formats, old database technologies, etc.

OPC-UA is one option for standardized integration. This is only possible for modern or enhanced old production lines. Some machines support other interfaces like MQTT or REST Web Services.

No matter if you integrate via proprietary protocols or open standards: The integration typically happens on different levels. While OPC-UA, MQTT, or REST interfaces provide critical information, some customers also want to directly integrate raw Syslog streams from machine sensors. This is much higher throughput (of less important data). Some customers also want to directly integrate with their SCADA monitoring systems.

Integration with the Rest of the Enterprise

While various industrial data sources need be integrated, this is still only half the story: The real added value is created when the data historian also integrates with the rest of the enterprise beyond IIoT machine and applications. For instance, CRM, Data Lake, Analytics tools, Machine Learning solutions, etc.

Plus hybrid integration and bi-directional communication between factories in different regions and a central cluster (edge and data center/cloud). Local edge processing in real-time plus remote replication for aggregation/analytics is one of the most common hybrid scenarios.

Kafka Connect/Kafka Clients/REST Proxy for Data Integration

Kafka Connect is a Kafka-native integration solution providing connectors for the data source and data sinks. This includes connectivity to legacy systems, industrial interfaces like MQTT, and modern technologies like big data analytics or cloud services. Most IIoT platforms provide their own Kafka connectors, too.

If there is no connector available, you can easily connect directly via Kafka Client APIs in almost every programming language, including Java, Scala, C++, C, Go, Python, JavaScript, and more. Confluent REST Proxy is available for bidirectional HTTP(S) communication to produce and consume messages.

Data Storage

Kafka is not just a messaging system. The core of Kafka is a distributed commit log to storage events as long as you want or need to. The blog post "Is Kafka a Database?" covers all the details to understand when Kafka is the right storage option and when it is not.

Tiered Storage for Reduce Cost, Infinite Storage, and Elastic Scalability

In summary, Kafka can store data forever. Tiered Storage enables separation of storage and processing by using a remote object store (like AWS S3) for infinite storage, low cost, and elastic scalability/operations.

Stateful Kafka Client Applications

Kafka is not just for the server-side. A Kafka application is (or should be) a distributed application with two or more instances to provide high availability and elastic scalability.

Kafka applications can be stateless (e.g. for Streaming ETL) or stateful. The latter is used to build materialized views of data (e.g. aggregations) or business applications (e.g. a predictive maintenance real-time app). These clients store data in the client (either in memory or on disk) for real-time processing. Zero-data loss and guaranteed processing order are still ensured because Kafka applications leverage the Kafka log as "backup".

Data Processing

Data Processing adds the real value to your data historian. Validation, enrichment, aggregation, and correlation of different data streams from various data sources enable insightful monitoring, proactive alerting and predictive actions.

Real-Time Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management (SCM) with Just in Time (JIT) and Just in Sequence (JIS) inventory strategies is a great example: Correlate the data from the production line, MES, ERP and other backend systems like CRM. Apply the analytic model trained in the data lake for real time scoring to make the right prediction about ordering parts from a partner.

I did a webinar with Expero recently to discuss the benefits of "Apache Kafka and Machine Learning for Real Time Supply Chain Optimization in IIoT".

Stream Processing With Kafka Streams/ksqlDB

Kafka Streams (Java, part of Apache Kafka)/ ksqlDB (SQL, Confluent) are two open-source projects providing Kafka-native stream processing at scale in real-time.

These frameworks can be used for "simple" Streaming ETL like filtering or enrichments. However, powerful aggregations of different streams can be joined to build stateful applications. You can also add custom business logic to implement your own business rules or apply an analytic model for real-time scoring.

Check out these examples on Github to see how you can implement scalable Machine Learning applications for real-time predictions at scale: Kafka Streams examples with TensorFlow and KSQL with H2O.ai.

Data Access

A modern data historian is more than HMI and SCADA. Industry 4.0 with more and more streaming data requires real-time monitoring, alerting, and analytics at scale with an open architecture and ecosystem.

Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)

A Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is a user interface or dashboard that connects a person to a machine, system, or device in the context of an industrial process. An HMI allows users to:

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems collect and record information or connect to databases to monitor and control system operation.

HMI and SCADA solutions are typically proprietary solutions; often with monolith, inflexible and non-scalable characteristics.

Kafka as Next Generation HMI, Monitoring, and Analytics

Kafka can be used to build new "HMIs" to do real-time monitoring, alerting, and analytics. This is not a replacement for existing technologies and use cases. HMI and SCADA worked well in the last decades for what they were built. Kafka should complement existing HMI and SCADA solutions to process big data sets and implement innovative new use cases!

Analytics, Business Intelligence and Machine Learning in Real-Time at Scale

HMI and SCADA systems are limited, proprietary monoliths. Kafka enables the combination of your industrial infrastructure with modern technologies for powerful streaming analytics (Streaming Push vs. Pull Queries), traditional SQL-native Business Intelligence (with Tableau, Qlik, Power BI or similar tools), and analytics (with tools like TensorFlow or Cloud ML Services).

Kafka Connect is used to integrate with your favorite database or analytics tool. For some use cases, you can simplify the architecture and "just" use Kafka-native technologies like ksqlDB with its Pull Queries.

Data Historian in the Cloud

The cloud is here to stay. It has huge advantages for some scenarios. However, most companies are very cautious linking internal processes and IT systems to the cloud. Often, it is even hard to just get access to a computer at the shop floor or top floor via TeamViewer to adjust problems.

The rule of thumb in the Automation Industry: No external access to internal processes! Companies ask themselves: Do I want to use a commercial third-party cloud to store and process data our proprietary and valuable data? Do we want to trust our IP to other people in the cloud on the other side of the world?

Edge and Hybrid IoT Architectures

There are a lot of trade-offs, and the cloud has many benefits, too. In reality, edge and hybrid architectures are the new black in the very conservative Industrial IoT market. This totally makes sense as factories and production lines will stay on-premise anyway. It does not make sense to send all the big data sets to the cloud. This has huge implications on cost, latency, and security.

Architecture Patterns for Distributed, Hybrid, Edge, and Global Apache Kafka Deployments

Kafka is deployed in various architectures, depending on the scenario and use case. Edge deployments are as common as cloud infrastructures and hybrid bidirectional replication scenarios. 

Security

No matter if you decide to move data to the cloud or not: Security is super important for Industry 4.0 initiatives.

While the use cases for a data historian are great, security is key for success! Authentication, Authorization, encryption, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), Audit logs, Governance (Schema Enforcement, Data Catalog, Tagging, Data Lineage, ...) etc. are required.

Many shop floors don't have any security at all (and therefore no internet / remote connection). As machines are built to stay for 20, 30 or 40 years, it is not easy to adjust existing ones. In reality, the next years will bring factories a mix of old proprietary non-connected legacy machines and modern internet-capable new machines.

From the outside (i.e. a monitoring application or even another data center), you will probably never get access to the insecure legacy machine. The Data Historian deployed in the factory can be used as termination point for these legacy machines. Similar to SSL Termination in an internet proxy. Isolating insecure legacy machines from the rest with Kafka is a common pattern I see more and more.

Kafka behaves as a gateway from a cybersecurity standpoint between IT and OT systems yet provides essential information to any users who may contribute to operating, designing, or managing the business more effectively. Of course, security products like a security gateway complements the data streaming of Kafka.

Secure End-to-End Communication With Kafka

Kafka supports open standards, such as SSL, SASL, Kerberos, OAuth, and so on. Authentication, Authorization, Encryption, RBAC,  Audit logs, and Governance can be configured/implemented.

This is normality in most other industries today. In the automation industry, Kafka and its ecosystem can provide a secure environment for communication between different systems and for data processing. This includes edge computing, but also the remote communication when replacing data between the edge and another data center or cloud.

Kafka as Data Historian to Improve OEE and Reduce /Eliminate the Sig Big Losses

Continuous real-time data ingestion, processing, and monitoring 24/7 at scale is a key requirement for successful Industry 4.0 initiatives. Event Streaming with Apache Kafka and its ecosystem brings huge value to implement these modern IoT architectures.

This blog post explored how Kafka can be used as a component of a Data Historian to improve the OEE and reduce/eliminate the most common causes of equipment-based productivity loss in manufacturing (aka Sig Big Losses).

Kafka is not an allrounder. Understand it's added value and differentiators in IoT projects compared to other technologies, and combine it the right way with your existing and new Industrial IoT infrastructure.

 

 

 

 

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