The Edge-to-Cloud Continuum

The computing paradigm has swung between centralization and decentralization over the last 50 years. The mainframes represented the centralized computing era. Then came the era of PC’s. While the IT departments used mainframes, the typical office worker used the PC. 

I view the cloud as another era of centralized computing with two key differences to the mainframes. First, the computer is not on your premises; and second, the computer is infinitely scalable. It serves the digital era where everything is a service (hosted in the cloud). 

Edge computing is the equivalent of the decentralized PC of the cloud era. Edge computing is computing that’s done at or near the source of the data. This could be on the device itself, or a small server closeby.

Edge computing addresses two major limitations of cloud computing.

Latency: Cloud computing is constrained by the speed of light. When we ask our voice assistant for the weather forecast, the assistant sends a compressed file to the cloud for processing, which, in turn, calls the weather API (Application Programming Interface) to return the answer. As we get closer to everything-in-real-time, we would like the computing to be closer to us.

Bandwidth: Sometimes the internet bandwidth is not available or it is cost prohibitive. For example, an oil rig operating in the ocean. The sensors and robots generate lots of data which are better analyzed at the location or nearby. 

The exponential growth of IoT devices will need edge computing. They will build on cloud computing concepts such as microservices, containerization and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Newer programming frameworks will be built on top of the cloud computing frameworks to make it a cloud-to-edge continuum.

In this emerging cloud-to-edge computing continuum my fear is for the companies who do not see the future unfold right in front of them. The question is not if the current legacy, monolithic application serves its purpose. The question is – does it prepare me to take advantage of the new paradigm that is emerging.