The Impact of Cloud Versus Local Infrastructure on Automatic IoT-Driven Hydroponic Systems

Technological advancements in the cloud field are becoming widely used on a large scale in increasing activity sectors. Agriculture is an important domain in everyday life, central to human existence. This research comparatively analyzes two proposed types of infrastructures that optimize the growth flow of plants in a hydroponic system for continuous monitoring, one full-cloud and one full-local. The study’s main objective is to determine which of the two infrastructures is more suitable for the hydroponic scenario by conducting seven types of tests. This research aims to fill a gap in the specialized literature through a detailed analysis of the configuration, implementation methods, and all implications of the two approaches from the perspective of the seven indicators. The seven indicators are response time, operational reliability, implementation costs, operational costs, configuration scalability, data accessibility, and data security. The cloud infrastructure uses Microsoft Azure technologies, while the local variant uses custom-made scripts and locally installed services. For both software infrastructures, the hardware components are identical, including an M5Stack module with sensors for monitoring temperature, humidity, electrical conductivity, and liquid level in the hydroponic container. The test results highlight that the local infrastructure offers a shorter response time (200 ms compared to 300 ms for the cloud infrastructure). The results also showed lower operational costs for the local infrastructure, making it more suitable for autonomous hydroponic systems. On the other hand, the results showed that cloud infrastructure has greater data accessibility than local infrastructure, and the security measures are advanced. These advantages of cloud infrastructure involve recurring costs of USD 82.57/month. The limitations of this research are associated with the exclusion of human errors and cybernetics simulations from the analysis. Another limitation concerns the real analysis of short-term costs. Future research will explore the real fluctuations of long-term costs. Additionally, infrastructure studies on different plant species and hydroponic farms will also be considered.