6 ms·

Edge Computing

71 points by robin_reala 6y ago

travisjungroth 6y ago
I love this post. Just some facts and a few reasonable opinions about a topic. It seems so grounded. It's like I asked someone very smart what they thought about edge computing.
ericwaller 6y ago
This is a great insight for full applications. But latency (mostly) aside, there seem to be a lot interesting use cases for what is more or less programmable CDN configuration. Particularly when you have a relatively straightforward application (architecturally at least), but want to tap into the very distributed, very scalable CDN layer for little bits of critical functionality.
- k__ 6y ago
  This. I used Lambda@Edge last week to smooth some rough edges between CloudFront and S3. S3 is just a HTTP server for CloudFront and S3 in itself is a rather dumb HTTP server. Lambda@Edge allowed me to add some additional features to that integration to make S3 a bit more bearable, like automatic index files and path cleanups.
jgrahamc 6y ago
I don't think latency is actually the most important feature of edge computing. Sure, it's great that if you use Cloudflare Workers you get very close to end users and have low latency. I think the real advantages will be: 1. Set-it-and-forget-it scalability 2. Compliance with data locality laws #2 is going to be the absolute wave of the future. Not just in Europe, but everywhere. Every country is going to introduce laws that mean their citizens' data needs to stay in region or in country. A widely distributed edge will make that easy to handle because it can be a configuration option.
- anonymousDan 6y ago
  What exactly do you mean by #1?
  - jgrahamc 6y ago
    I mean that the promise of edge computing is that you write some code, deploy it and don't worry about scaling it, regions, availability zones and the like. It's just code that gets run.
    - jeswin 6y ago
      > It's just code that gets run. I agree. But it also means that it's mostly unrelated to the edge, or edge computing; with the same constraints the code can run anywhere. To me the promise of edge is that it could work quite well with decentralized apps (not limited to blockchain-based). The work you guys are doing with IPFS is a great start. Add: When you think about it, most current apps are centralized and it's unsurprising that they can work well with the cloud (AWS/Azure/Google); edge is just mostly CDN for now. Decentralized is when those models become incompatible, and where edge can show strength.
      - zekrioca 6y ago
        CDN is mostly related to "content" (i.e., data) delivery. Edge is more generic, and relates not only to "content", but also to "processing" and "networking" to reduce the response time multiple clients experience. Decentralized apps is not really related, though one can really employ edge datacenters to achieve so..
        jeswin 6y ago
        The point I'm making is that edge can't do much now in terms of "processing". Most data is centralized and you'll need to hit a centralized system to access it. Facilities needing lower latency are more likely to keep it on-prem. As of now, it's mostly dealing with CDNish workloads. However, that changes with decentralized apps since they place a different set of architectural demands, and don't have centralized datasources. For instance, a search in p2p space might involve connecting to a lot of peers - latency matters. Data (often signed chains) might need to be fetched from dozens of different sources, combined and queried locally - again latency matters. Clusters of people who you talk to are often co-located, edge wins again. Latency doesn't matter when it's a hand countable number of simultaneous queries (as in current apps). We can even work around it with approaches like batching, as with GraphQL.
EvanAnderson 6y ago
I am waiting for someone to "discover" placing "edge computing" nodes on-premise with client computers to remove the last-mile latency, speed up bandwidth-intensive operations like file sharing, and lessen the dependence on unreliable pro-sumer grade Internet connections (read: the no-SLA, somewhat reliable, typically violently asymmetric connections available for small to medium-sized businesses in a lot of the US for a reasonable cost, often from a monopoly provider). I guess "Azure Stack" is sort of that now, but that's not targeted at the small to medium-sized business market (yet).
- tyingq 6y ago
  That seems to be at least one reason for AWS Outposts...so Amazon doesn't lose revenue as some edge things move to customer local on-prem. Though there's no small/medium business version of it yet.
- tootie 6y ago
  Azure Stack and AWS Outposts are already targeting at least mid-size businesses. The issue that they are still not simple to implement and give marginal benefits to most use cases. I never actually managed to get one of these onboard, but we did evaluate them on behalf of some clients who were to trying to some very high-end digital experiences for customers. Geofencing, personalized kiosk experiences, dwell time tracking. And they wanted it all to be really fast. We did some pricing (for both our services and equipment/hosting costs) and it would have been millions and taken at least 6 months to build out. I also worked at a pretty big retailer that had some some ancient "edge" compute workloads that we were in the process of decommissioning because it was too big of a pain to keep them updated, powered and connected at 300 locations. Chik-Fil-A has a great write up of how they run K8s on racks in every restaurant: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d67242675e2 https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-... Typical small businesses don't have the resources of needs to do any of that. They are already far more likely to invest in turnkey technology like Salesforce, Square, etc than provision anything at all in the cloud on their own.
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  NCR has been delivering on-prem solutions worldwide for decades, their most popular offering, Aloha, stores transactions at the site in cases of Internet outages, and pushes them up whenever conditions improve. This works as well in suburbia and Western Europe as it does in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America I personally work on their edge team to deliver backend services for their next-gen offering.
imvetri 6y ago
I'm hoping to see for visual commputing(not computer vision) in the feed someday. I also have a fantasy tests for OS. Check what happens when camera feeds the monitor input back on monitor keeping monitor's pixel vales as input to this fictional visual OS
daxfohl 6y ago
With 5G that last mile between the metro hub and the user is only 5ms. This is critical for things like factory automation, autopilot, etc. Deploy your workload to AWS Wavelength or Azure Edge Zone 5G, and stick a 5G card in your factory tools or drones or whatever, and you're done. So IMO cloud providers having presence in all the big telco hubs is the future of "edge". Or at least a future. Disclosure, used to work at Azure Edge Zones.
- fulafel 6y ago
  But what's the intersection of critical stuff that needs to shave those milliseconds and stuff that is fine with the reduced reliability and latency variability of wireless comms vs fixed line?
  - daxfohl 6y ago
    Those are important questions and nobody knows for sure yet. Another of the challenges is capacity planning. Since the footprint is so much smaller, there will presumably be much more significant spikes in traffic and load. Like when CIS is in town or something. Throw in all the variations like GPU or FPGA (which may be more common on edge), and it becomes challenging to balance available capacity vs cost. My guess is edge business model will be more like long term commitment than spin up and down at will.
    - fierro 6y ago
      this is a great point.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Yep... 5G edge computing has been in the making for a while, it was talked about 10-ish years ago (maybe not with that name) when 5G was an upcoming thing and it must have been in r&d drawing board collecting justifications before it. So marketing has had a long time to build use cases already. Of course a "build it and they will come" argument can be made in favour of something we haven't yet been able to imagine but it's starting to feel far fetched. Or maybe it's just a question of how far-edgy it makes sense to be vs cost (the original idea IIRC was building capacity colocated with the base stations).
tengbretson 6y ago
I want a joint venture between Starlink and Cloudflare. Put compute resources on the satellites and have a distributed CDN + edge workers in space. Having satellite internet with latency competitive with cable is fine and all, but what if you could beat it?
- Arrath 6y ago
  IT person sighs heavily, clamping down their helmet as they board the Dragon capsule for the weekly turning it off and on again.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    Supposedly, in the 1940s, when Arthur C Clarke (now mainly known as an SF author) proposed the idea of geostationary satellites [0] as extra-terrestrial radio relays, he believed that they would have to be manned space-stations because of the need to keep changing the valves that had blown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary_communications_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary...
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      If GEO becomes crowded enough, it's not possible to just send more hardware and park the defective one somewhere else and launch costs keep going down I wonder if we'll see more human serviceable hardware.
  - tengbretson 6y ago
    We just need a Terraform provider that maps provisioning to launching a Falcon-9, and deprovisioning to firing a photon torpedo at the satellite.
    - teddyh 6y ago
      Sounds like a job for a fleet of orbital rocket boots. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm
rausej 6y ago
This article is missing a huge part of why Edge computing is necessary: Transit Cost and Backbone Peering.

71 points by robin_reala 6y ago

I love this post. Just some facts and a few reasonable opinions about a topic. It seems so grounded. It's like I asked someone very smart what they thought about edge computing.

ericwaller 6y ago

This is a great insight for full applications. But latency (mostly) aside, there seem to be a lot interesting use cases for what is more or less programmable CDN configuration. Particularly when you have a relatively straightforward application (architecturally at least), but want to tap into the very distributed, very scalable CDN layer for little bits of critical functionality.

k__ 6y ago
This. I used Lambda@Edge last week to smooth some rough edges between CloudFront and S3. S3 is just a HTTP server for CloudFront and S3 in itself is a rather dumb HTTP server. Lambda@Edge allowed me to add some additional features to that integration to make S3 a bit more bearable, like automatic index files and path cleanups.

jgrahamc 6y ago

I don't think latency is actually the most important feature of edge computing. Sure, it's great that if you use Cloudflare Workers you get very close to end users and have low latency. I think the real advantages will be: 1. Set-it-and-forget-it scalability 2. Compliance with data locality laws #2 is going to be the absolute wave of the future. Not just in Europe, but everywhere. Every country is going to introduce laws that mean their citizens' data needs to stay in region or in country. A widely distributed edge will make that easy to handle because it can be a configuration option.

anonymousDan 6y ago
What exactly do you mean by #1?
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  I mean that the promise of edge computing is that you write some code, deploy it and don't worry about scaling it, regions, availability zones and the like. It's just code that gets run.
  - jeswin 6y ago
    > It's just code that gets run. I agree. But it also means that it's mostly unrelated to the edge, or edge computing; with the same constraints the code can run anywhere. To me the promise of edge is that it could work quite well with decentralized apps (not limited to blockchain-based). The work you guys are doing with IPFS is a great start. Add: When you think about it, most current apps are centralized and it's unsurprising that they can work well with the cloud (AWS/Azure/Google); edge is just mostly CDN for now. Decentralized is when those models become incompatible, and where edge can show strength.
    - zekrioca 6y ago
      CDN is mostly related to "content" (i.e., data) delivery. Edge is more generic, and relates not only to "content", but also to "processing" and "networking" to reduce the response time multiple clients experience. Decentralized apps is not really related, though one can really employ edge datacenters to achieve so..
      - jeswin 6y ago
        The point I'm making is that edge can't do much now in terms of "processing". Most data is centralized and you'll need to hit a centralized system to access it. Facilities needing lower latency are more likely to keep it on-prem. As of now, it's mostly dealing with CDNish workloads. However, that changes with decentralized apps since they place a different set of architectural demands, and don't have centralized datasources. For instance, a search in p2p space might involve connecting to a lot of peers - latency matters. Data (often signed chains) might need to be fetched from dozens of different sources, combined and queried locally - again latency matters. Clusters of people who you talk to are often co-located, edge wins again. Latency doesn't matter when it's a hand countable number of simultaneous queries (as in current apps). We can even work around it with approaches like batching, as with GraphQL.

EvanAnderson 6y ago

I am waiting for someone to "discover" placing "edge computing" nodes on-premise with client computers to remove the last-mile latency, speed up bandwidth-intensive operations like file sharing, and lessen the dependence on unreliable pro-sumer grade Internet connections (read: the no-SLA, somewhat reliable, typically violently asymmetric connections available for small to medium-sized businesses in a lot of the US for a reasonable cost, often from a monopoly provider). I guess "Azure Stack" is sort of that now, but that's not targeted at the small to medium-sized business market (yet).

tyingq 6y ago
That seems to be at least one reason for AWS Outposts...so Amazon doesn't lose revenue as some edge things move to customer local on-prem. Though there's no small/medium business version of it yet.
tootie 6y ago
Azure Stack and AWS Outposts are already targeting at least mid-size businesses. The issue that they are still not simple to implement and give marginal benefits to most use cases. I never actually managed to get one of these onboard, but we did evaluate them on behalf of some clients who were to trying to some very high-end digital experiences for customers. Geofencing, personalized kiosk experiences, dwell time tracking. And they wanted it all to be really fast. We did some pricing (for both our services and equipment/hosting costs) and it would have been millions and taken at least 6 months to build out. I also worked at a pretty big retailer that had some some ancient "edge" compute workloads that we were in the process of decommissioning because it was too big of a pain to keep them updated, powered and connected at 300 locations. Chik-Fil-A has a great write up of how they run K8s on racks in every restaurant: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-a-7d67242675e2 https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/edge-computing-at-chick-fil-... Typical small businesses don't have the resources of needs to do any of that. They are already far more likely to invest in turnkey technology like Salesforce, Square, etc than provision anything at all in the cloud on their own.
vinceguidry 6y ago
NCR has been delivering on-prem solutions worldwide for decades, their most popular offering, Aloha, stores transactions at the site in cases of Internet outages, and pushes them up whenever conditions improve. This works as well in suburbia and Western Europe as it does in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America I personally work on their edge team to deliver backend services for their next-gen offering.

imvetri 6y ago

I'm hoping to see for visual commputing(not computer vision) in the feed someday. I also have a fantasy tests for OS. Check what happens when camera feeds the monitor input back on monitor keeping monitor's pixel vales as input to this fictional visual OS

daxfohl 6y ago

With 5G that last mile between the metro hub and the user is only 5ms. This is critical for things like factory automation, autopilot, etc. Deploy your workload to AWS Wavelength or Azure Edge Zone 5G, and stick a 5G card in your factory tools or drones or whatever, and you're done. So IMO cloud providers having presence in all the big telco hubs is the future of "edge". Or at least a future. Disclosure, used to work at Azure Edge Zones.

fulafel 6y ago
But what's the intersection of critical stuff that needs to shave those milliseconds and stuff that is fine with the reduced reliability and latency variability of wireless comms vs fixed line?
- daxfohl 6y ago
  Those are important questions and nobody knows for sure yet. Another of the challenges is capacity planning. Since the footprint is so much smaller, there will presumably be much more significant spikes in traffic and load. Like when CIS is in town or something. Throw in all the variations like GPU or FPGA (which may be more common on edge), and it becomes challenging to balance available capacity vs cost. My guess is edge business model will be more like long term commitment than spin up and down at will.
  - fierro 6y ago
    this is a great point.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Yep... 5G edge computing has been in the making for a while, it was talked about 10-ish years ago (maybe not with that name) when 5G was an upcoming thing and it must have been in r&d drawing board collecting justifications before it. So marketing has had a long time to build use cases already. Of course a "build it and they will come" argument can be made in favour of something we haven't yet been able to imagine but it's starting to feel far fetched. Or maybe it's just a question of how far-edgy it makes sense to be vs cost (the original idea IIRC was building capacity colocated with the base stations).

tengbretson 6y ago

I want a joint venture between Starlink and Cloudflare. Put compute resources on the satellites and have a distributed CDN + edge workers in space. Having satellite internet with latency competitive with cable is fine and all, but what if you could beat it?

Arrath 6y ago
IT person sighs heavily, clamping down their helmet as they board the Dragon capsule for the weekly turning it off and on again.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  Supposedly, in the 1940s, when Arthur C Clarke (now mainly known as an SF author) proposed the idea of geostationary satellites [0] as extra-terrestrial radio relays, he believed that they would have to be manned space-stations because of the need to keep changing the valves that had blown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary_communications_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Geostationary...
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    If GEO becomes crowded enough, it's not possible to just send more hardware and park the defective one somewhere else and launch costs keep going down I wonder if we'll see more human serviceable hardware.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  We just need a Terraform provider that maps provisioning to launching a Falcon-9, and deprovisioning to firing a photon torpedo at the satellite.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    Sounds like a job for a fleet of orbital rocket boots. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00955.htm

rausej 6y ago

This article is missing a huge part of why Edge computing is necessary: Transit Cost and Backbone Peering.