The Internet is a buzz with things called “Edge”, but what does it actually mean?
Wikipedia describes Edge Computing as follows:
Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm which brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, to improve response times and save bandwidth.
This doesn’t sound like anything very new, infact Wikipedia continues to explain:
The origins of edge computing lie in content delivery networks that were created in the late 1990s to serve web and video content from edge servers that were deployed close to users.
This function is quite simple. Content is stored closer to where it is requested. By this nature, all Content Delivery networks (CDNS) have been doing Edge for decades. This might seem like news to some, but for those in the industry it makes total sense. It’s the simpliest of applications, deliverying storage or caching, closer to end users.
If this has been going on for decades already, what is all the buzz about?
There is obviously a big shift more recently into more advanced applications and infrastructure closer to users. This webpage is actually built entirely on edge infrastructure. Without having a Cloud connection at all, its entire content lives in a distributed database and has no one single ‘home’. See Cloudflare Workers.
Today users can actually excute applications, not just deliver static objects. This signals a significant change into the way computing existed over the years. Looking back over time, edge computing represents a new wave of computing. In the earliest of computing instances, a mainframe was the compute source, the next wave brought about Personal Computers and the ability to have that compute locally. Cloud computing followed soon, with the ability to offload workload to a central location, but more so, do it without the need to worry about hardware. Edge Computing brings that further in that you shouldn’t even need to worry about the operating system, just the code that gets deployed.
With this new wave, it could be as envisaged, the network is the computer.
Come back for the next article, “The Edge Network”.