XaaS Multi-Cloud Marketplace Architecture Enacting the Industry 4.0 Concepts

Cloud computing in conjunction with recent advances in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) unravels new opportunities for the European manufacturing industry for high value-added products that can quickly reach the market for sale. The Internet of Things joins the Internet of Services to enact the fourth industrial revolution that digitalises the manufacturing techniques and logistics while pushing forward the development of improved factories with machine-to-machine communication delivering massively customised products tailored to the individualised needs of the customer. Interconnected CPSs using internal and cross-organizational services cooperate in real time increase the business agility and flexibility of manufacturing companies. Using CPS with cloud computing architectures leverage data and services stored and run in cloud environment from different vendors that usually offer different service interfaces to share their services and data. However, when using such architectures data silos appear and different vendors having different service interfaces can easily result in vendor lock-in issues. This paper proposes a multi-cloud marketplace architecture leveraging the existing myriad of different cloud environments at different abstraction levels including the Infrastructure-, Platform-, and Software-as-a-Service cloud models—that is, Everything as a Service or XaaS—delivering services and with different properties that can control the computation happening in multiple cloud environments sharing resources with each other.