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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-inten

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.

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.