9 ms·

What the f*** is the edge?

• lucisferre 8y ago
  Honestly anyone who invests on the basis on what layer of cloud computing is currently being used to solve the problem can't be doing too well.
• stephengillie 8y ago
  Investor makes business decisions based on marketing fluff, more at 11.
• mehrdadn 8y ago
  > real-world transmission times between e.g. London and San Francisco end up at around 150ms. That's [...] a catastrophe for self-driving cars needing to make realtime decisions. Why in the world would/should a car in London be relying on a cloud computer in SF to tell it how to make real-time decisions...?
  • im_down_w_otp 8y ago
    Most of the teleoperation companies at the moment. As far as I know. Worse still many are intending to gang onto the primary cellular infrastructure to perform the function. Which makes everything worse.
    • perl4ever 8y ago
      It's fine if you are going to have your cars remotely controlled with a latency > 150 ms while they operate autonomously as things happen in a shorter time frame. But the other way around seems insane. It's reminiscent of the way people have switched from "human drives, computer deals with emergencies" to "computer drives, human deals with emergencies" as though it was no big difference.
      • Dylan16807 8y ago
        150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time. The big deal is the lack of reliability on that connection.
        • perl4ever 8y ago
          I would equate "lack of reliability" with "latency that is sometimes rather large".
          • Dylan16807 8y ago
            There is a qualitative difference between a jitter of a few dozen milliseconds, vs suddenly getting no data for twenty seconds because something went wonky.
        • tomxor 8y ago
          > 150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time. Comparing a single component latency in technology to human reaction time is a complete straw man i see far too often. (I'm not blaming you, you are probably just repeating it). 150ms _is_ a good human reaction time, but in technological terms that includes sensor, network, processor, network bus, actuator and finally any physical latency of action being achieved. A better and contextually relevant comparison here would be: human pressing a button after light turning on vs autonomous vehicle turning it's wheels 1 degree after seeing a light turn on. I bet you they are very similar, and I would not be surprised if the vehicle was slower. 150ms of network latency is significant because it's on top of the existing latency in the _whole_ system that makes up the car, including the sensors, the actuators whatever bus' inbetween them all. When you stick it's brain in the cloud and add 150ms of latency it's like a human trying to drive a car through a VR webcam, it will make it so much harder, 150ms latency between action and sensor is _very_ noticable even in humans, this is the same reason why cloud based FPS gaming (as in piping the result of the render over the network) doesn't work... no one is going to stick the brain of an autonomous vehicle behind 150ms of _additional_ latency.
          • 8y ago
  • DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    If you are asking this question you are clearly more informed than the sales rep asking about being on the edge. The point wasn't that a car would ever do this. The point is that it would be absolutely ridiculous to do real time computation with such a high latency. Unless your question is rhetorical, there is no answer except "you would not do that" Some people out there for sure have no idea that the cloud is still bound by the constraints of physics and spacetime and that there is latency based on how close your servers are.
  • rurban 8y ago
    People should stop coming up with such wrong metaphors. Real-time doesn't mean fast, it just means reliable latency. If you miss a cycle it needs to reboot or stop. But it doesnt mean that they are particularly fast. They are rather slow in fact. A real time controller in car would be perfectly fine with 150ms cycles, it just depends what is controlled. An engine controller is fine with 500Hz, a GPS controller with 10Hz, Formula 1 has 10Khz controllers, ... So if a costly central computing service is fine to control something in a car, it might be done. But obviously not as described in the article, they are not stupid. A central service would be async and not RT of course. Updating maps, traffic warnings, eg.
    • mindentropy 8y ago
      > People should stop coming up with such wrong metaphors. Real-time doesn't mean fast, it just means reliable latency. If you miss a cycle it needs to reboot or stop. But it doesnt mean that they are particularly fast. They are rather slow in fact. This! In other words it is determinism. It should be highly deterministic. Most of the real time controllers even suggest to disable cache to be highly deterministic.
  • Johnny555 8y ago
    I think the better question is why should a car be relying on a cloud computer at all for real-time decisions -- what would that car do when it's in a cellular dead zone?
    • kybernetikos 8y ago
      While I don't want safety critical decisions to be made by cloud services so that my provider can charge me a premium to unlock even safer decision making, I think that it's pretty reasonable to start with full autonomy only on preprepared stretches of road. If that was the deal then you could have connectivity built into the road or road furniture and if the car detected a lack of connectivity it should come to a safe stop or revert to manual control. It seems like we could benefit from a technological principle of Subsidiarity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
    • qznc 8y ago
      There are edge cases where it is possible. My employer sells Automated Valet Parking [0] where the video cameras of the garage are used to steer the vehicle. Of course, this is a well controlled space where you can ensure connectivity and the car will drive slowly so you can ensure safety. I don't believe safe real time and 5G cellular networks can be combined at reasonable scale. The latency is enough for some use cases, but reliability/connectivity/safety is not enough. So we still agree here. [0] https://www.bosch-mobility-solutions.com/en/highlights/automated-mobility/automated-valet-parking/ https://www.bosch-mobility-solutions.com/en/highlights/autom...
• altcognito 8y ago
  I presume that nobody sane is sending critical self driving car decisions to the cloud.
  • DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    It was only used as an example of something you CANNOT do with such high latency. It was not implying some company out there is actually using a high latency server for real time processing
    • perl4ever 8y ago
      It seemed to be implying someone might want to, if they had lower latency. And the issue is how can you guarantee sufficiently low latency 100% of the time? You need a fallback, and if you have a fallback, why do you need such low latency?
    • Dylan16807 8y ago
      It's a pretty bad example of that, though. There are enormous problems involved in the idea of remote piloting a car, but a 150ms feedback loop is no big deal. It's slightly better than a human. Especially if you look at the latency of one-server-per-continent, which is still extremely far from "edge": you get something like 50ms or better. That's easily good enough to control anything a human could control by hand.
      • jononor 8y ago
        Pretty sure there are systems where one would struggle to regulate with 20Hz loop that humans can do. At least with easy methods like linearized PID. For example an inverted pendulum
• millstone 8y ago
  Please fix the scrolling under mobile Safari, it has no momentum.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • LiamPa 8y ago
    And chrome.
    • wolframhempel 8y ago
      Thanks for the hint, will do (seems to be iOS specific, hmm)
      • dantiberian 8y ago
        Please just remove anything that interferes with the scrolling at all.
        • wolframhempel 8y ago
          Should be fixed now (there's nothing trying to interfere with the scrolling, just an overflow setting to hide the hamburger menu that seemed to cause the laggy scroll on iOS. (Hopefully I didn't make it worse - redeploying while being Hackernews #1 is always a bit scary)
          • millstone 8y ago
            Much better now, ty!
      • Sylos 8y ago
        Apple doesn't allow other browser engines than WebKit in its App Store, so Chrome on iOS uses WebKit, not Blink, and the problem is probably actually WebKit-specific.
• mindslight 8y ago
  One time, I got a telemarketing call from someone selling satellite TV or something like that. I kept him on the line some time, asking all sorts of enthusiastic questions about his amazing service. I then proceeded to ask him how high up his satellites were, and if they could be giving God cancer. He (obviously) did not have a good answer. I then disappointedly told him that I was going to have to run his setup by my wife, as she made the religious decisions. This seems like that, modulo Poe's law.
  • HyperTalk2 8y ago
    When did people on this site start using the word "modulo" for something other than the modulo operator in mathematics?
    • mikeklaas 8y ago
      I was used it in math undergrad 18 years ago, so it isn't an invention of hacker news
      • joezydeco 8y ago
        It’s been in the Jargon file for a few decades... http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/modulo.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/modulo.html
    • mehrdadn 8y ago
      The weird thing is I feel "minus" makes more sense. Isn't "modulo" remainder? Whereas you're talking about the part that's left out, rather than the part that is remaining?
      • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        You specify what's left over. Makes sense to me, though I can see how it would look backwards
      • uluyol 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• askaboutit 8y ago
  Wouldn’t a PHP app with app servers in locations in many POI then connected to azure cosmosdb essentially feel like and act like”the edge” to a user. Nuxtjs and nextjs are “the edge” apps. But the server being centrally located especially for global ecommerce needs to go the way of the dodo. Shopify being one. Some plus clients are near $800,000+ a year. Yet still no database or app servers outside the US.
• vvanders 8y ago
  > This front-layer of computing power is also referred to as "fog computing" or "dew computing". The bit about self-driving cars talking to a server to make split-second decisions is laughable but this right here just makes you want to flip the table. If you're requirements are so extreme that you need to be on "the edge" you can do that today, it's called client-side development.
  • noxToken 8y ago
    People have been doing client-side development for millennia. That's ancient. Who wants boring offline technology that's locked down from communication with the cloud where hundreds - no, thousands of servers are using algorithms that are constantly improved with machine learning?! I kid. Mostly. Most sane people would agree with you. However some people can't see the forest for the trees. Has "buzzword-driven development" become a phrase yet?
  • devbranch 8y ago
    What separates fog from client-side is the concept of hierarchical fog nodes. You could imagine the car's sensors as the edge devices and the car itself as a fog node. The whole fog hierarchy would be something like: edge devices - cars - intersections - ... - cloud. At the intersection level collisions could be avoided by processing data from local sensors and warning incoming cars.
• zackbloom 8y ago
  We (Cloudflare) have largely stopped talking about the 'edge' for some of the reasons cited in the article. 1. No one actually knows where it is or what it means. 2. It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly). 3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to. We would rather imagine a world where we embed the compute directly into the network, putting hundreds or thousands of points of presence within a few ms of everyone on earth. We imaging moving all the compute and storage there, not just some fraction which needs ultra speed. If it is easy to run code close to your users, and it’s affordable, there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t run everything as close to the consumers of the Internet as possible.
  • DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    A fully mesh P2P computer cloud would be magical. Everybody is the edge that way :)
    • zwkrt 8y ago
      Read A Deepness in the Sky for a dystopian/cynical view of this technological advancement.
    • random1temp2 8y ago
      Ethereum?
    • phs318u 8y ago
      https://subutai.io/p2p-cloud-platform.html https://subutai.io/p2p-cloud-platform.html
    • pjkundert 8y ago
      We’re building that right now: https://holo.host https://holo.host
      • goliatone 8y ago
• coupdejarnac 8y ago
  This seems like an exercise in quickly ascertaining what kind of audience you have. If you are talking with someone who needs to feel like they are buying "the edge" or whatever, adjust your sales pitch. Also, if you start off with a buzzwordy pitch and realize you're speaking with an engineer, switch to a more technical approach.
• apendleton 8y ago
  > When e.g. AWS Cloudfront, Amazon's Content Delivery Network talks about "Edge Caching" it simply refers to the Amazon datacenter closest to whoever requests the site. Kind of? If by "datacenter" they mean the things they said earlier that AWS had 18 of, then no, not really. There are many more Cloudfront points of presence that there are AWS regions (over 100 of the former). In practice unless someone lives very close to a proper AWS region (like I do here in DC), odds are there's a Cloudfront PoP much closer to them than a "datacenter" (i.e., AWS region).
  • stingraycharles 8y ago
    This is correct. A PoP can very well be an ISP’s datacenter, even if they usually do not provide hosting / colocation services, because it’s in their own interest since it reduces their overall bandwidth usage.
  • WaxProlix 8y ago
    It seems a bit nit-picky, but AWS has ~18 commercial regions, but far more datacenters. It's availability zone that's a data center (more or less), not a region. So for each region you end up with 3 to 5 data centers or something like that.
    • Dunedan 8y ago
      Even a single AZ might consist of multiple datacenters.
• jpatokal 8y ago
  > "Edge Caching" it simply refers to the Amazon datacenter closest to whoever requests the site I can't speak for AWS, but for GCP there are many more Edge and CDN points of presence than there are datacenters: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ (flip to Network tab in map) And in Google's case "Edge" simply means where you exit the public internet and get on to Google's own network: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure Although there are also "edge nodes" (caches) located within ISPs outside the Google network. Disclaimer: I work at GCP, but not on networking.
  • hayd 8y ago
    It's still a "datacenter" though, right? Just a smaller one. It's not a "region" i.e. there's no other services available other than cloudfront (and I guess lambda@edge). Or do you mean they might not be owned by aws (or Google)?
    • Dunedan 8y ago
      From what I heard, AWS rents a racks in commerical datacenters for its Route53 endpoints. So while that's also a datacenter of course, it's not an "Amazon datacenter".
    • jrockway 8y ago
      Not really. Google literally just sends ISPs some servers stick into their racks with other networking equipment. These are very "scrappy" compared to what people think of as data centers, but if a room with some network cables, an AC, and a rack counts as a data center... then sure, they're datacenters ;) https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache > Once registered and qualified by Google, we will send you a simple agreement for joining the GGC program. After you have electronically signed this agreement, Google will ship you servers that you install in your facility and attach to your network. Google will work with you to configure the servers and bring them into service.
    • manigandham 8y ago
• mirimir 8y ago
  While this is an interesting discussion, it doesn't explicitly make the point that there's typically a tradeoff between network latency and processing speed. Even if I'm using some server with 500 msec network rtt, I come out ahead if doing whatever locally would take over 500 msec longer.
• axiometry 8y ago
  Does anyone know what visualization tool the author used to create the AWS architecture diagram? It looks really cool.
  • BOOSTERHIDROGEN 8y ago
    https://arcentry.com/ https://arcentry.com/
    • vxNsr 8y ago
      What's kinda mind blowing is that this is an actual business. I can't imagine why someone would need this specifically for their cloud presentations. Like isn't visio enough for everything?
      • ironjunkie 8y ago
        Wow! So the original story is written on the blog of a company that is creating Chart of clouds architectures (and probably being on the edge)? I'm amazed by how niche that business is! also very nice plug to put your diagrams into the story
        • vxNsr 8y ago
          Right, I didn't even make the connection until the OP asked the question here.
      • jessaustin 8y ago
        It has been fifteen years since I had access to a machine with Visio installed, and my memories from back then aren't good memories. This seems more like a descendant of GraphViz than anything to do with Visio.
        • vxNsr 8y ago
          I personally don't use it, but I know nearly everyone in my company does. (F500, >300K employees)
• azernik 8y ago
  This is a strange use of the word "edge". Especially because, as others here have noted, it doesn't include a clear indication of the "core", aside from maybe large datacenters. The older usages of "edge" are from the networking world, where infrastructure and technologies have a relatively sharp distinction between "core/backbone/trunk networking" (large trunk lines, intercontinental fiber links, etc.) and "edge networking" (last-mile telco infrastructure, routers handling one building or campus of a company, etc) From this networking perspective, both the end-users local device and the centrally-hosted server are at the edge, though AWS will have more reliable and lower-latency connections to the internet core than your cell phone.
• matchagaucho 8y ago
  For all the effort we've put into moving spreadsheets and financial data to the cloud, there's just no replacing the immediate feedback of a local Excel app when doing What-If-Analysis, Goal Seeking... or a dozen other financial tasks. Keeping "the edge" in sync with a centralized system-of-record via intelligent Excel add-ins is beginning to look like our big bet for 2019 (and beyond?)
• feritkan 8y ago
  For the record according to this link, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ AWS operates in 18 geographies (called) regions... These are not data centers. There are 55 availability zones (AZs) at AWS regions, and each AZ has at least 1 data center..12 more AZs at 4 more regions are also announced
  • discodave 8y ago
    Also, there are over 100 AWS CloudFront POPS: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/details/#infrastructure https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/details/#infrastructure And you can do compute in CloudFront POPS with Lambda@Edge: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-edge.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-edge.htm...
    • petrikapu 8y ago
      Only node.js available in Lambda@Edge
• perl4ever 8y ago
  FWIW, the Edge is a vehicle made by F∗∗∗.
  • stephengillie 8y ago
    Needs more edge-lord.
• Illniyar 8y ago
  The anecdote at the start of the article seems to me to suggest the investor talked about "being at the edge of science" or technology - i.e. doing something disruptive and new. But the rest of the article talks about the location of data and servers and it's relationship with the word "edge". Am I missing something? Why is the anecdote unrelated to the article?
  • redisman 8y ago
    I also got completely lost on what was the point. I thought the investor was talking about is it "sexy/new" rather than a technical definition of an edge in a datacenter..
  • ironjunkie 8y ago
    I thought the same thing. I believe the author intentionally wanted us to believe it was "the edge" based on your definition, but then wanted to make a point that "the edge" is now "the physical edge". Another explanation would also be that a couple years ago the stereotypical technically-limited VC would ask if this app would be in "the cloud". The author used the same stereotype and adapted it to "the edge".
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > I believe the author intentionally wanted us to believe it was "the edge" based on your definition, but then wanted to make a point that "the edge" is now "the physical edge". Personally, I immediately knew it's about cloud!edge, even when I saw the title. If you pay attention to current trending buzzwords (as I unfortunately do, skimming the things some people I work with post on company Slack), you'll learn that "edge computing" is the most recent buzzword in the cloud space.
  • wolframhempel 8y ago
    (Author here) sorry about the confusion, I can see where you are coming from. But yes, the investor was very much enquiring about whether it is on "the edge" in a cloud computing sense. Having said that, it's important to stress that many - in fact, most - of the VCs I've talked to were amongst the most impressive, accomplished, knowledgeable and intelligent people I ever had the pleasure to work with. There is, however, a (growing?) number of VCs with a purely financial background that approach investment decisions by establishing a framework of future trends/ developments (Crypto, Blockchain, Edge, Sharing Economy, E-Mobility and so on) and then vet potential investments based to how well companies align with these trends as well as basic suitability criteria (founding team, execution, traction etc.) This isn't a bad thing per se as it might add a less biased view to investment decisions than the one made by the tech-founder-funds-tech-founder echo chamber, but it can lead to the level of detachment with the fundamentals of what one's talking about displayed in this article.
• Johnny555 8y ago
  but it is not enough for cases requiring sub-millisecond latency and incessant availability: Fields such as IoT metric processing Why would IoT metric processing be latency sensitive? Whether my thermostat processes the temperature in 3 milliseconds or 30 milliseconds seems immaterial.
  • wolframhempel 8y ago
    true for private IoT, but the industrial IoT is orders of magnitude bigger and comes with a host of use cases where machines operate at 100 to 1000 Hz cycles - and for stopping your 20.000 rpm milling machine or opening your pressure release valve 30 milliseconds makes a lot of difference.
• Jedd 8y ago
  > Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to cloud back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about ... You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical. The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the market's eagerness to engage in ill-considered change as a convenient substitute for thoughtful progress, manifesting as regular vacillation between a centralised and a distributed approach to compute & storage, 'keeps us all in jobs'.
  • setr 8y ago
    It doesn't necessarily have to be due to an ill-decision; thick/thin client cycling can be seen as the obvious result of network/compute cost effectiveness ration swapping. When network is cheaper, thin clients make more sense; when compute is cheaper, then it makes more sense to have it local, and thus thick clients. And due to diminishing returns + economies of the scale, as the market starts investing in one, the other side starts to make more sense..
    • Jedd 8y ago
      You may be right, but I'm wary of the implication that 'the market' is rational. Also, if the market leans more towards network or compute (I'm not sure that's a useful distinction, but I'll run with it for now) wouldn't the economies of scale necessarily continue to accentuate the initial trend, rather than induce an oscillating pattern?
      • TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        Data likes to accrete, almost as if it has its own virtual gravity. Cycles oscillate some, depending on compute speed and network latency. But there isn’t as much oscillation as people think. 80’s/90’s style non-networked personal computing was a rare exception to the usual rule of networked centralisation with smrt-ish terminal access.
      • setr 8y ago
• a13n 8y ago
  So annoying when people try to be fancy and break the default scrolling behavior. That's one way to get me to not read your blog.
  • lostlogin 8y ago
    The author has commented and it seems this is unintentional.
    • troika 8y ago
      Thanks :-) - should be fixed now.
      • a13n 8y ago
        Glorious!
• iamleppert 8y ago
  Why the hell would an investor care about some technical performance nuance that could easily be implemented via setting up some Cloudfront distributions? Did she ask about your cache headers as well?
• User23 8y ago
  Is it really a self-driving car if it needs a network connection?
• yy77 8y ago
  I think for most cases, "on the edge" means some devices on the sites of those IOT sensors/small collection machine installed. In compare to "on the cloud" which means on the server hosted by Amazon/Azure etc.
• zmix 8y ago
  Would be interested in how the talk with his investor continued...
• justaaron 8y ago
  guitar player from U2
  • thedancollins 8y ago
    Came here for this. Leaving satisfied. Also, I can appreciate how some might feel like we are in a "fat client" world again and in some cases I am sure we are - it will depend on who is wielding the hammer as to whether it is used "properly" or the "most efficiently". I love how the modern cloud allows us to deploy computational power to the source of the data - if we so choose/need to.
• borus 8y ago
  Nerdalize is a startup that builds a decentralized data center as it's core product. Well interesting if you're building edge services: www.nerdalize.com
  • keithpeter 8y ago
    I remember hearing about something similar to this some time ago. What happens during heat waves? Just wondering.
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to butt back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about: In a world of increasingly ubiquitous computing power we are well advised to reflect on where our computation happens and how we can make the most efficient use of the resources at our disposal. Which is exactly why we the cynics say we've come full circle. Also, while the cyclical nature of client/server design seems to be a thing, unfortunately underlying ownership is not cyclical. For instance, a cycle or two ago, the "edge" computer meant software I bought running on my machine. This cycle, it means software I don't have any stake in running on machine I lease and have little control about. This is the part of the trend that's worrying to me. Cycles of thin/thick clients are irrelevant. Disenfranchising end users is a problem.
  • wolframhempel 8y ago
    > from thick client to butt back to thick client - did you build something that replaces "cloud" with "butt"?
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Ooops, forgot about that extension running on the machine I wrote that comment on.
      • abababba 8y ago
        https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt
      • gregknicholson 8y ago
        See? You do have meaningful control over your machine! You are free to choose from a great number of useful and fun pre-approved apps that you love. The possibilities are limitless! (Of course, you must choose the same apps as everyone else. You are a loyal citizen, aren't you?)
      • dskloet 8y ago
• binbag 8y ago
  If you are willing to embrace the term 'cloud' - as everyone here seems willing to do, including the Cloudflare (...) guy - then you have already admitted that you are happy with that type of garbage. 'Edge' seems trivial in comparison. If you really care about this bullshit then you should agree to avoid all these VC/buzzword/corporate/marketing bullshit terms.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Unfortunately, you need to live with those terms if you want money, because people with money use them. I assume they don't even care if a given buzzword has any relation to reality whatsoever - all that matters is whether the market (read: other rich and wannabe-rich people) thinks that buzzword is hot or not.
• expertentipp 8y ago
  I deeply hope it's a buzzword prank so that non-tech people and managers will start demanding "edgy software" and "edgy computing" and looking to hire "rockstar edgelord".
  • jessaustin 8y ago
    At the very least one hopes that managers will start googling for "edging videos".
• taikahessu 8y ago
  I think OP is missing the point here. As he being the sales rep, the only valid answer would have been "Yes, it's on the edge.". It is a question dedicated to find out if you yourself think the product is good enough or how well you think it positions itself with the competition. Maybe it's just me being stupid here, but I find it funny how the whole discussion here has turned into a technical debate, which the original customer's point IMHO clearly wasn't. There is no edge. You define the edge by what you believe in.
  • erikb 8y ago
    Replace "edge" with any other hot term and that's your IT market. Even without demand and even without innovation a lot of stuff is changed all the time. Current systems are centralized? Well let's decentralized everything. Current systems are decentralized? Centralize. Every. Thing. Watching it as engineer can be especially painful, because you already know that the other thing is not that much better. And more often this b.s. starts with the optimal trade-offs and turns into exactly what was carefully avoided with good architecture and decision making. Sometimes I really think some of the managers are sitting there thinking "Yes, I know that you are smarter than me. But that is your disadvantage. Just to get some leverage I will now push for the stuff you told me to avoid again and again over the last 3 years, and you can't beat me in that approach because everything in you is fighting against this."
  • ownagefool 8y ago
    I think the author was missing the point, but not in the way where he should lie. Edge in the context asked, with the explanation given, likely was refering to "bleeding edge", "cutting edge", or "leading edge". As in the customer wants to buy modern technology that makes their company look hip, their developers happy, and gives them an advantage against the competition. Some rant about CDNs, or where the edge of the network is, seems inappopriate here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_edge_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_edge_technology
  • wolframhempel 8y ago
    Author here: When talking to an investor you are only a "sales rep" to some degree. You are the owner of a company looking to raise funding by selling a certain percentage of shares, so much is true - but the mindset is more one of finding the right partner. Given a promising enough vision and execution there's no shortage of interested VCs and the challenge is in picking the right one for the long term. All VCs offer money, but many offer value beyond that. As the VC(s) you'll choose will hold a significant stake including board seats and voting rights you'll want someone with a deep enough understanding of your industry, technology, market, sales or operational model. Even if we were talking about selling to a customer here I would argue that one's better off providing long-term value (and forfeiting a deal if one can't) than just catering for any buzzword-driven expectation and watch the whole edifice crumble a few months down the line
• potench 8y ago
  An article about the edge and no mention of Akamai. Last I heard even Amazon Prime Video was being streamed on Akamai, not on CloudFront.
• ownagefool 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_edge_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_edge_technology Not sure why everyone assumes the question was regarding networking.
• jmount 8y ago
  A gem on this topic: "On the Design of Display Processors" (The Wheel of Reincarnation) http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland-design-of-display-processors.pdf http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...
• Nokinside 8y ago
  5G networks take heavy bet on the future of edge computing. 5G's secret weapon against other wireless technologies is reliable ultra low latency (up to 1 ms, at a low failure rate). It's enough for network automation in factories and factory robotics. For customer applications it would make a sense to but graphics processors that can do VR, AR, games and machine learning inference very close to customers. It's and more practical for mobile users cheaper to get computing power as service than carry it around.
• ctvo 8y ago
  The edge, as used most often in my experience, is the entry point that connects the public and private internet. It rarely has anything to do with location (in almost all cases it's implied the edge is regionalized to be the closest data center to the target). For AWS: a Lambda at the edge, for example, may be a Lambda behind an API Gateway that acts as the public entrypoint into infrastructure behind a VPC. That Lambda is at the edge.
  • johncolanduoni 8y ago
    On AWS that’s a somewhat confusing way to put it since there is Lambda@Edge, which allows you to run Lambdas to handle/manipulate CloudFront CDN requests at their edge locations.
• Animats 8y ago
  Did the terminology come from "edge routers"? Those are simply the last router before the device which uses the network.
• derReineke 8y ago
  I too enjoy thick butts.
• livid 8y ago
  I tried to search "ETSI MEC" in hackers news and got no results. https://portal.etsi.org/Portals/0/TBpages/MEC/Docs/Mobile-edge_Computing_-_Introductory_Technical_White_Paper_V1%2018-09-14.pdf https://portal.etsi.org/Portals/0/TBpages/MEC/Docs/Mobile-ed... It is one of the definitions of edge computing, any comments?