Industry 4.0 Vision for the Supply of Energy and Materials

4 Cloud Computing and Its Impact on Industry 4.0: An Overview

Mahdi Sharifzadeha^a,* Hossein Malekpoura, ^a and Ehsan Shojab^b

a Sharif Energy, Water and Environment Institute (SEWEI), Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iranb Computer Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran* Corresponding author. Sharif Energy, Water and Environment Institute (SEWEI), Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

4.1 Introduction

There are various cloud-based applications that we may use every day without thinking about them. Every time you share a file on your Google Drive, download a file, use a mobile app, or play an online game, actually you are benefiting from cloud services. All these services are from the servers and some digital spaces that are probably away from the users around the world.

When you use a hard drive or a USB stick for storing your information, you can access it only when your hard drive or USB stick is available, but keeping your information on Google Drive, OneDrive, or AirDrop is much different. In the latter case, you can access it from the Internet with any computer that is connected at any time and in any place. Now, what is cloud computing?

In this chapter, we try to collect some useful information about cloud computing and some related topics such as grid and edge computing. The contents of this chapter are organized into six sections. At first, cloud computing is introduced, some definitions of it are presented, and a historical ...