The Factory Finally Gets a Kernel: Software-Defined Automation and the End of the PLC Monolith

TL;DR Virtual PLCs decouple control logic from dedicated hardware, running S7-1500 workloads — including safety — on industrial PCs and standard server iron. Industrial Edge collapses data and control onto a single compute surface, letting AI inference share infrastructure with real-time automation. API-first engineering toolchains with package management dismantle the walled-garden IDE model that has defined factory automation for three decades. The risk profile inverts: the attack surfac...