Industrial SCADA with Ignition
This article refers to Platform v3.3.0. The current Platform version is v3.3.0.
Overview
Ignition by Inductive Automation is a full-featured SCADA platform that offers unlimited tags, clients, and connections for plant-wide industrial data management. It runs as a container and can be deployed on virtually any hardware platform.
Barbara makes it easy to deploy Ignition to as many locations as needed. From a single management console, you can push Ignition to any edge node, regardless of where it is physically located.
We support two Ignition editions provided by Inductive Automation (Ignition and Ignition Edge) as well as two deployment models: a Single Remote Gateway and a High-Availability Cluster. The following sections explain the differences so you can choose the edition and deployment model that best fit your architecture.
Choose your Ignition edition
Inductive Automation offers two editions of the Ignition platform that can be deployed from Barbara: Ignition and Ignition Edge. Both are containerized applications and can be deployed using the same workflows described in this tutorial.
Ignition is the full SCADA platform, designed to act as the central hub for plant-wide data collection, visualization, alarming, reporting, and IT/OT integration. Its unlimited licensing model supports unlimited tags, clients, and connections.
Ignition Edge is a lightweight edition designed for edge nodes, field devices, and remote sites. It provides local visualization, data acquisition, scripting, MQTT publishing, and data synchronization with a central Ignition gateway, extending SCADA capabilities to the edge of the network.
Choose Ignition when the node acts as a central SCADA server or needs to host projects, manage plant-wide operations, and serve multiple clients. Choose Ignition Edge when the node is deployed close to the process, providing local control, buffering data during network outages, and synchronizing information with a central Ignition gateway.
For a deeper look at the Ignition platform and its editions, see the Inductive Automation website.
Choose your deployment
In this section, you'll find two deployment options. The Single Remote Gateway is the fastest and most hands-off approach: Barbara deploys one gateway per site and automatically restores its configuration from a backup file. The High-Availability Cluster provides an additional layer of resilience by running a Master and Backup gateway pair that automatically fail over in the event of a failure. Choose the option that best fits your operational requirements.
Single remote gateway
Deploy Ignition to a remote edge node and let it configure itself on first start. Driven by the BOOTSTRAP secret, the container downloads a pre-built gateway backup (.gwbk) from a specified URL and restores it without any manual intervention. This allows the gateway to come online with the exact projects, tags, and connections defined in the backup file, ensuring a consistent and repeatable deployment across sites.
Start here: Deploy Ignition.
High-availability cluster
A single gateway represents a single point of failure. Ignition for Cluster removes this risk by providing hot-standby redundancy. One gateway operates as the Master, handling all client connections and workloads, while the other acts as the Backup, continuously synchronizing its state with the Master through the Ignition Gateway Network.
Both gateways sit behind a Traefik reverse proxy, which provides a single entry point for clients. If the Master becomes unavailable, Traefik automatically redirects traffic to the Backup gateway, and Ignition promotes it to active status. As a result, clients experience only a brief reconnection while operations continue uninterrupted.
Start here: Deploy Ignition for Cluster.
The Ignition demo projects reference MySQL databases for historian data. Deploying those databases is out of scope for these tutorials. Database connections will show Faulted in the Gateway UI, but this does not prevent you from opening Perspective or Vision demo sessions.
If you need the full dataset, MySQL and phpMyAdmin are also available in the Barbara Marketplace and can be deployed on the same node.
Summary
In this section, you've explored the two decisions that define an Ignition deployment on Barbara. First, choose the Ignition edition that best fits your architecture: Ignition as a full-featured, plant-wide SCADA platform, or Ignition Edge for lightweight data acquisition, local control, and integration at remote sites. Then, choose the deployment model: a Single Remote Gateway for fast, zero-touch deployments, or a Hot Standby Cluster for high-availability environments where service continuity is essential.
Regardless of the edition or deployment model, Barbara provides a consistent deployment experience from a single management interface. Applications are deployed, configured, and updated from the Barbara Panel, enabling repeatable rollouts across distributed edge infrastructure with minimal manual intervention.
Each deployment option includes its own prerequisites and step-by-step guide. Select the combination of edition and deployment model that best matches your operational and availability requirements, then follow the corresponding tutorial to get started.