Revving Up For Edge Computing

Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by zzzeek on Sunday November 10, 2019 @05:20PM (#21500556)

I work at Red Hat and am involved with edge technologies, while if you look at it in a generalized way, sure, it seems like "huh, it's client server with lots of clients" but it does really refer to novel new architectures being deployed by customers where there are more computing resources out in the field than would normally be present.

more simply, Chick-Fil-A's post about their edge efforts really made it clear for me when the term first came out - a miniature datacenter in every store. this is definitely novel: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-...

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by jka on Sunday November 10, 2019 @05:51PM (#21500703)

That's one of the most interesting architectural / conceptual blog posts I've seen in a while, thanks for sharing!

(it makes me think there must be a ton of interesting scenarios around applications where images/containers migrate between the core/cloud and the edge on-demand (or simply have edge replicas), and situations in which mapreduce style computation could be farmed out to edge clusters before sending aggregated results home)

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by nloladze on Sunday November 10, 2019 @06:10PM (#21500792)

So every edge device run it's own Docker container and the fog or the nodes act as a swarm manager before depositing the relevant information into the cloud? I've always thought that we would see drone-based air traffic controllers to manage and handle air traffic, especially as we can gain flying vehicles in the future.

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by jka on Sunday November 10, 2019 @07:02PM (#21501070)

I'm not sure I completely grasped the air-traffic control example you mentioned, but I think you're on the same track, yep. Low-latency, localized computation within a well-connected physical area.

To try to make it more concrete, here's a scenario:

Imagine that smartphones are able to opt-in to become part of an edge cluster which communicates over some kind of local network fabric (be that wi-fi / 5G / similar).

Now imagine that you have 2,000+ fans at a sporting event or live performance, all with their phones and many taking live recordings.

Shifting high-fidelity video/audio data from that many devices at an event back to the cloud in realtime might not be particularly feasible and/or useful for various network contention, bandwidth, and latency reasons (both client and server-side).

But if those devices were already running a containerized application to perform -- say, 3D image stitching[0], for example -- you could collect, compute and redistribute results via the cluster in near-real-time, potentially providing some pretty immersive audience experiences (3D highlights and replays and all kinds of interesting augmented reality interpolation of audience & performers).

It'd also raise questions around who owns/authorizes the on-device computation, who has permission and copyright over the data captured, and various other issues.

All very hypothetical ideas, but technically feasible. Predicting fast food order demand is much more practical challenge to begin with, no doubt :)

[0] - https://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-updates-photosynth-w...

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by darau1 on Sunday November 10, 2019 @05:48PM (#21500685)

I always felt like edge computing was more along the lines of clients that do all the computation themselves, then federate their data among peers, instead of each client connecting to a server.

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by tyingq on Sunday November 10, 2019 @05:50PM (#21500697)

There do seem to be many different definitions of "edge". The parent and grandparent above, big CDNs with "edge functions", etc.

Has anyone compiled a list of concrete example use cases?

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by darau1 on Sunday November 10, 2019 @06:08PM (#21500785)

Not to my knowledge, but I've found one that calls itself an 'edge' service, and some I might classify as 'edge'.

- snips.ai calls itself an 'edge' ai service because all the computation is done on your device.

- ledger cli is one small project that I consider to fall under the 'edge' umbrella, because all it's 'computation' is done on your own device, even though that's a tiny amount of computation.

- taskwarrior is another that I might call edge, because it also handles all computation, reporting, etc, on your device. There can be a server involved, but it only handles synchronization of data, i.e. federation

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by zrail on Sunday November 10, 2019 @06:36PM (#21500924)

I would not include ledger in that category. Ledger is just software.

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by darau1 on Sunday November 10, 2019 @07:06PM (#21501095)

I can see your point. If ledger is edge, then so is firefox, or notepad. The definition would be too broad to be useful.

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Re:Revving Up For Edge Computing by etaioinshrdlu on Monday November 11, 2019 @10:05PM (#21511203)

It sounds a bit like pre-cloud business IT architecture. Put the servers somewhere on-site.

It is really hard to see much new here. 20 years ago you might put a Windows 2000 server in each restaurant... What's changed is we have better server management tools: ansible/puppet/docker/kube...

The reason we moved to the cloud was because the Internet gained massive capacity and there were economies of scale in huge datacenters.

What chick-fil-a is doing is'nt wrong, but feels more like the pendulum swinging than actually new tech.

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