Edge Compute - Why ?

Edge computing is a logical evolution of cloud-based network architecture (hosting centralized compute, storage for business application/s). 

Cloud architecture resulted in the exponential growth of business applications providing pay as you grow business model, truly revolutionary. What happened next was every business application(there are exceptions and valid use cases for not moving to the cloud) moved to the cloud to save CAPEX, improved time to market, and operational flexibility( XaaS). 

Datacenter began to proliferate at an exponential speed and as per Statista's survey, there are 7.2 million data centers globally as of 2021. 

A logical business problem that became much more noticeable with cloud architecture was almost all the end-user data was routed to a datacenter for business analytics and return traffic to execute any business decision on the end device.

IoT exacerbated this problem with now millions of devices ready to send traffic to these data centers. You can guess, the Internet will become a bottleneck(bandwidth) apart from latency and any unpredictable network disruptions. 

How does Edge computing help? 

Edge compute moves some portion of the storage and compute resources from centralized data centers and closer to the data source itself. It can be considered as an evolution from centralized computing to distributed computing. Keep it in mind it is not like traditional computing with on-premise deployment, although you can consider it something similar to the branch office concept. 

What could be the challenge? 

Decentralization may lead to high levels of monitoring and control as compared to the centralized model, are we going back 😉 ?

Interesting use cases: 

1. Autonomous vehicles: Everyone's favorite, firstly you will have millions of cars, and sending everything to a centralized data center will choke the internet, and secondly you don't want to have latency or networking disruptions while the car is on it way 😉

2. Farming: Collect all the sensor data, compute it locally and ensure crops are harvested in peak season. 

3. User experience(latency): Measure performance for users across the internet and determine the most reliable low latency path 

What is the opportunity :

For product vendors, it provides a new market segment to build devices with limited compute and storage but enormous volume, pluggable/s to connect these edge mini data centers to end-users and upstream to mother data centers. 

I plan to follow with an additional post on the architecture for edge computing, till then 

Happy reading and stay safe !