Jay DesLauriers, University of Westminster

As once cloud-hesitant industries are encouraged to move to the cloud to run computational workloads, shortfalls in technical skills and cloud knowledge become apparent. Manufacturing is one such industry. Over the past five years, the CPC at Westminster has participated in several European projects investigating Manufacturing in the Cloud. The most recent of these, DIGITbrain (digitbrain.eu), aims to build a platform for Manufacturing-as-a-Service and support the industry with running workloads and accessing Digital Twins on top of cloud infrastructure. The platform will feature open-source DevOps tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform and Ansible, integrated together inside the MiCADO Execution Engine (micado-scale.eu). End-users of the platform need not be familiar with these tools’ domain-specific languages or the cloud platforms and middleware that support their workloads. Instead, users will provide values for pre-defined metadata fields that will describe the microservices, models, data and infrastructure that make up and support their workloads. This metadata will be automatically compiled down to an intermediary language based on the OASIS TOSCA Specification (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). The intermediary language can be interpreted by MiCADO and transformed into formats understood by orchestration tools such as Kubernetes and Terraform, which will execute the users’ workloads.