But the term seems to get used for everything and anything apparently.
But some people would say if it's in any kind of data center, it's not true edge.
Depends a bit on wether traffic from Singapore would be allowed to go to NY if the Singapore host goes down.
Your home or office with a bunch of computers can be classified as a data center. It might not be very redundant or efficient, but still.
If you complain that the definition of “data center” is inexact, you’re missing the point—the definition of “edge” is inexact, too. That’s okay. People have a good enough definition of “data center” that it doesn’t need to be explained here. And people also understand that given definitions are not perfectly precise—there are exceptions and unusual cases.
Only in the way that a plucked chicken is a man. (http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Featherless_biped)
Hardware becomes the limiting factor when you’re talking edge versus multi region where hardware is one of many limiting factors, but often network is the more important factor as indicated in this link
Edge also has the distinction of being hardest to instrument for observability and often is required to work in multiple environments.
But to people selling "Edge AI" products, an edge device is something like a smart speaker or industrial camera.
At least that is my current IIoT definition. You could have bunch of pretty dump sensors and then somewhat beefy these days gateway. And the gateway here could do some computation.
Exactly. Example: We wanted / needed to deploy on the edge. Use case: A very very small part of a live streaming service, basically cache preloading functionality, as well as authentication / session management / DRM. All the rest would be handled by some upstream service.
Cloudflare and Akamai both have the concept of edge workers - light weight application APIs that can serve modest capacity. Cloudflare also has a cache on the edge.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-workers/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...
> The delivery of computing capabilities to the logical extremes of a network in order to improve the performance, operating cost and reliability of applications and services. By shortening the distance between devices and the cloud resources that serve them, and also reducing network hops, edge computing mitigates the latency and bandwidth constraints of today’s Internet, ushering in new classes of applications. In practical terms, this means distributing new resources and software stacks along the path between today’s centralized data centers and the increasingly large number of devices in the field, concentrated, in particular, but not exclusively, in close proximity to the last mile network, on both the infrastructure and device sides.
Ps. I work at https://edgenode.com
Imagine this: within a CDN’s compute you try to serve distributed db transactions optimistically then fall back to your big cloud region when it fails. The CDN is kind of a write-through cache. You still have to address the CAP theorem distributed state challenges of synchronizing state and making a consistency/availability/partition tolerance tradeoff, and it seems like a reasonable use of a CDN.
Edge implies putting your stuff in a CDN-sized datacenter that has only a subset of the full regional services, may not be able to scale up significantly on demand, may be more expensive, have less local storage and failover redundancy, etc. The multi-region considerations come in here too, but there's a whole extra set of things to worry about.
Basically you rarely want to deploy your whole app to edge; have a central or multi-region thing under the hood, and let the edge handle some very specific functionality. And even then, only if a few ms of latency makes a big difference to your clients (and they can deal with the lack of failover redundancy).