Applications having high statefulness is not a bad edge use case, it is often the reason why substantial edge deployments are done! I've typically seen the ter

Applications having high statefulness is not a bad edge use case, it is often the reason why substantial edge deployments are done! I've typically seen the term "edge compute" to denote a deployment that solves a networking constraint which makes use of a traditional data center prohibitive: available bandwidth too low, latency is too high, or network is too unreliable. It is often cheaper to make the edge heavily stateful than to add sufficient network capacity so that all the data can be backhauled to a data center. Three reasons why there is often substantial state at the edge: you are doing sensor processing for operational reasons that intrinsically requires a lot of state to extract features of interest locally before sending those features upstream; you are aggregating feeds for operational reasons at the edge from various sensor platforms also at the edge to apply analysis across them; the edge platforms need to retain data for a specified period of time for regulatory, auditing, forensic, etc reasons. Not every edge case is like this and my sample is biased, but beefy boxes at the edge to avoid data backhaul are not that uncommon.