
Future on the Edge
John Hagel, one of the foremost strategists of our time, runs a fascinating blog called The Edge Perspective. One of his posts, Innovation on the Edge, is pure gold and is worth every minute of your time. The post is a summary of six articles he did for Business Week regarding his take on innovation. Quoting him verbatim “Over time, I have focused more sharply and explicitly on the importance of the edge as a source of value creation and strategic advantage.” Being a technologist and observing the new trends bubbling up, it seems John’s ideas around innovation literally and figuratively are mapping directly to the next-generation of computing waves ready to shore up the edge infrastructure. The commoditization of the edge is not a pipe dream anymore, it’s morphing, and it’s morphing fast into reality. To top it all off, edge computing now has real use cases behind it as is evident by the figure below.
Source : Unknown (Cannot defend the numbers)
Trends in the market
Recent technology trends in the market are further fueling the ‘edge’ and helping it evolve as a wider funnel into the public cloud :
- Mobile Network evolution to 5G.Network slicing required for the variety of use cases is already underway.
- Massive IoT proliferation including mission-critical ones like connected cars, health monitors, etc.
- More intelligent IoT application(s) conjoined with purpose build IoT devices.
- The explosive growth of data, analytics and continuous demand for low latency as well as reducing bandwidth costs.
- Distributed cloud models with concepts like fog computing.
Why is edge required?
If the above trends are any indication, the next logical question to be asked is why these will require an edge evolution. The following are some of the reasons why an intelligent edge will be a necessity :
- Compute: Latencies may deem computation on the centralized cloud useless.
- Storage: Not all data needs to go to the cloud, not all data has time to go to the cloud, not all data can go to the cloud.
- Networking: Security, Acceleration, Compression & Aggregation.
Not only the IaaS services mentioned above, but there will be a slice of PaaS services that will be demanded from the edge. The evolution path of the edge will follow the public cloud trajectory albeit at a limited scale.
How is edge going to evolve?
Structural Elements of the edge
In my opinion, the edge itself will be composed of the two structural elements defined below:
- CloudEdge: A distributed edge with close proximity to user endpoint satisfying it’s immediate IaaS needs.
- CloudExchange: An exchange, facilitating brokerage of compute to CloudEdge.
A blockchain verified introduction into the edge for a new CloudExchange and its capabilities seems too quixotic right now, but would be interesting :)
Core Technologies required for intelligent edge
- Mobile Technology with sufficient bandwidth and Network Slicing.
- Compute/Storage proximity to End Points.
- On-demand orchestration, metering and flexible resource extraction layer from available compute, storage & networking on the edge.
- Edge having right uniform abstraction to advertise it’s capabilities so that it can be dynamically tapped into.
- Ephemeral Multi-Tenancy throughout the stack.
Key Characteristics of a smart edge
Depending on the type of application following characterizations will be expected from the edge infrastructure:
- Highly secure: Imperative, non-negotiable.
- Low Latency: Table stakes and a primary reason for edge to exist.
- Reliability: Extremely important especially for mission-critical applications.
- Highly Available: Challenges galore especially for critical use cases.
- Data Handling: Store, Cache, Process, and Stream.
Unleashing the Developers
In this day and age, no infrastructure is good enough if you are not able to unleash developers onto it. The future of distributed applications will include the edge as an integral part of the equation. The following figure shows how future applications might be laid out on a combination of edge+cloud infrastructure.
For march of the cloud to go on unabated, it’s imperative that the foundation on edge is strengthened. All in all, the moment is ripe for the journey to begin.
