Edge Computing Isn't A Replacement For Cloud; It Just Has Different, Complementary Strengths.

“Current infrastructures are designed around a few basic assumptions: enough bandwidth to support any remote application, an abundance of compute in a remote cloud, and nearly infinite storage.

But the demand for immediate response times in physical world applications defies this approach.”

Despite the ever-increasing capacity of data centers and the near limitless capacity of the cloud, it’s not enough to enable time-critical IoT devices to respond as quickly as practicality demands. Edge computing occurs at the edge of the wide area network (WAN), where the activity of the smart device takes place. Edge computing reduces latency and makes connected apps more resilient and responsive.

In essence, edge computing is about time and scale. Because edge computing takes place at the device, it can be instantaneous, which is critical to replicating human responses to events. A driverless car, for instance, can’t afford the time it takes to send obstacle avoidance data to a centralized cloud data center and then back to the car because the seconds it would take to make that loop would mean the difference between a safe ride and calamity.

Cloud computing, on the other hand, is about space and power. Cloud is essential for data processing that takes a lot of computational power, such as machine learning, predictive and prescriptive analytics and certain types of process automation. Edge computing isn’t a replacement for cloud; it just has different, complementary strengths.

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