Understanding Infrastructure Edge Computing. Alex Marcham
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help of a few special people.
First, I would like to thank the friends whom I share each day with as we all do our best to keep each other moderately sane from one week to the next. I’ll always do my best to listen and help you as you each do for me, and I wish you all the greatest happiness and success in life. That is, unless one of you says that my hair is rubbish again, in which case we will be forced to engage in a cage fight.
Second, thank you to my family. Although we may spend a lot of time apart, physical distance is no match for our combined love of badgers, elephants, and hummingbirds. That said, it is a lot easier to maintain a set of hummingbird feeders than it would be to provide for a load of badgers or a passing herd of elephants, but this is matched by the difficulty of photographing any hummingbird properly.
Third, thanks to the team at Wiley for their insight and support for this project from start to finish. The telepathic portion of this book will be available at a later date, so this will have to do for now.
Finally, thanks to everyone I have spoken to and learned from on the topics of engineering, writing, and life in the past three decades across the world. We are the sum of our choices and experiences.
1 Introduction
Few could have guessed the impact the internet would have on us all at its inception. Today, the internet and the services it provides are essential for billions of people across the world. It is a primary source of communication with friends, family, and our communities; it is the primary way in which we access many essential services, as well as the way that increasing numbers of us go to work, pursue our educational goals, and access sources of entertainment, all on demand.
We did not get to this point by accident. Although the current state of the internet could not have been fully foreseen decades ago, it is due to the continuous efforts of skilled and driven people from across many different disciplines that the modern internet is able to support us as it does today. The story of the internet is not one of a single grand original design; it is one of consistent iteration and ingenuity to adapt to new technical and business challenges which have emerged over the decades.
As they have in the past, new and emerging use cases are driving the evolution of internet and data centre technology. This is resulting in new generations of infrastructure which are reimagining how the internet that we all use on a daily basis should be designed, deployed, and operated as a whole.
Distributed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are set to permanently reshape how many industries, from healthcare and retail to manufacturing and construction, operate due to their ability to enhance the decision‐making process and automate difficult tasks with extraordinary speed and precision. City‐scale internet of things (IoT) and cyber‐physical systems provide machines the means to interact physically with our world in ways that have been impossible or impractical to achieve before, supported by fifth generation (5G) cellular network connectivity and new versions of cloud computing, which are able to support high‐bandwidth, low‐latency, and real‐time use cases.
The key element underpinning all of these areas of advancement in both technology and business is infrastructure edge computing. It is one thing to demonstrate a use case in a laboratory environment where everything is a known variable; it is quite another to then operate a commercial service in the real world with all of the messy constraints that introduces, from cost to performance to timescales.
Edge computing is one of the most frequently mentioned emerging technologies, which many believe will make a significant impact on the landscapes of both technology and business during the decade of the 2020s. The concept seems simple: By moving compute resources as close as possible to their end users, theoretically the latency between a user and their application can be reduced, the cost of data transport can be minimised, and these two factors combined will make new use cases practical.
But what really is edge computing, beyond the hype, marketing material, and hyperbole that always accompany any major technological shift? With so many competing definitions of even the most basic elements of the technology, can we succinctly define concepts and terminology which allow us to have a consistent understanding of the challenges we are trying to solve together as an industry?
What are the key factors driving edge computing, and what must a solution provide in order to solve key technical and business challenges? How does edge computing really replace, compete with, or augment cloud computing? What is infrastructure edge computing, and does it stand alongside the traditional regional, national, and on‐premises data centre, or does it seek to replace them entirely?
This book aims to answer all of these questions and provide the reader with a solid foundation of knowledge with which to understand how we got to this inflection point and how infrastructure edge computing is a vital component of the next‐generation internet – an internet which enables suites of new key use cases that unlock untapped value globally across many different industries.
2 What Is Edge Computing?
2.1 Overview
Before delving into the details and technical underpinnings of infrastructure edge computing, it is necessary to understand some of the history, terminology, and key drivers behind its development, adoption, and usage. This chapter aims to detail some of these factors and provide the reader with a shared base of knowledge to build upon throughout the rest of this book, starting with terminology.
2.2 Defining the Terminology
One of the most challenging aspects of edge computing has been agreeing upon a set of terminology and using it consistently across the many industries to which edge computing is of interest. This is by no means a unique challenge when it comes to emerging technologies, but in the case of edge, it has contributed significantly to confusion between multiple groups and companies who have struggled to reconcile their individual definitions of edge computing so that ultimately a shared view of what the problem to be solved is, in addition to where it is and how to solve it, could emerge and be used.
Part of the challenge in defining edge computing is that by its very nature, the concept of an edge is contextual: An edge is at the boundary of something and often delineates the specific place where two things meet. These two things may be physical, as pieces of hardware; they may be logical, as pieces of software; or they may be more abstract, such as ownership, intent, or a business model.
Another part of the challenge has been attempting to compress the many dimensions across which a group or company may be concerned with edge computing into a small number of terms which are general enough and yet able to convey a specific meaning. Although it is appealing to create terms which describe a complex and specific set of dimensions as they relate to edge computing, this is a challenging path to create terminology which is general enough to use outside of that same group because the more dimensions a term or phrase aims to address, the less approachable it becomes.
The key to any set of terminology is consistency, and the way to achieve that even in highly technical discussions is to limit the scope of the concepts which the terminology aims to define. Once the key parameters of the definition are established, a neutral set of terminology can be created which then serves as the basis for additional layers of complexity to be added, promoting adoption and usage.
The Open Glossary of Edge Computing [1], a project arising out of the initial State of the Edge report [2] and co‐authored by the author of this book, established a neutral and limited dimension set of terminology for edge computing which has seen adoption across the industry and aims to simplify the discussions around edge computing by using the physical location of infrastructure and devices to delineate which type of edge computing each is able to perform by using the last mile network as the line between them to create a clear point of separation. Additional dimensions such as ownership, a specific business model, or any other concern can then be layered on top of this physical definition.
Along with the