The adoption of both Cyber–Physical Systems (CPSs) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has
enabled the evolution towards the so-called Industry 4.0. These technologies, together with cloud
computing and artificial intelligence, foster new business opportunities. Besides, several industrial
applications need immediate decision making and fog computing is emerging as a promising solution
to address such requirement. In order to achieve a cost-efficient system, we propose taking advantage
from spot instances, a new service offered by cloud providers, which provide resources at lower prices.
The main downside of these instances is that they do not ensure service continuity and they might
suffer from interruptions. An architecture that combines fog and multi-cloud deployments along with
Network Coding (NC) techniques, guarantees the needed fault-tolerance for the cloud environment,
and also reduces the required amount of redundant data to provide reliable services. In this paper
we analyze how NC can actually help to reduce the storage cost and improve the resource efficiency
for industrial applications, based on a multi-cloud infrastructure. The cost analysis has been carried
out using both real AWS EC2 spot instance prices and, to complement them, prices obtained from
a model based on a finite Markov chain, derived from real measurements. We have analyzed the
overall system cost, depending on different parameters, showing that configurations that seek to
minimize the storage yield a higher cost reduction, due to the strong impact of storage cost