Has edge computing arrived?
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Just because you don’t recognize it doesn’t mean that Edge hasn’t arrived. Those of us in the data center or infrastructure space often look for Edge to show up like the Kardashian’s entourage — something you couldn’t miss. In the consumer space, folks expect edge to announce itself when they use technology, as if they might hear, “thank you for using this facility, which was enabled via an edge solution.” Edge has already arrived in critical ways, we just don’t recognize it as such. One of the problems for infrastructure geeks like me is that without some huge killer app, which by itself requires hundreds of new data centers distributed globally, edge seems to not be happening.
Edge is more likely to be dozens to hundreds of locations with 1 to 10 servers. If 1,000 ants attacked you individually over the course of several days, you probably wouldn’t think “Oh my god, they’re taking over the world.” But if 1,000 ants all attacked you at the same time you would notice. Edge deployments are more like the ants attacking one to three at a time. Instances are being deployed for thousands of different use cases in thousands of individual locations, but they arrive by individual UPS delivery, not via a train or even a semi-trailer truck.
It's been there for a while. It's certainly not fit for every workload, but we do have use cases where edge computing is required and when it yields better performances, especially when you need low latency and being close to the source of information.