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Wouldn't running on the edge of the internet mean running on the devices that I see when I look around my house? It feel like this serverless thing is rather s
by __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Wouldn't running on the edge of the internet mean running on the devices that I see when I look around my house? It feel like this serverless thing is rather serverful, unless I've overlooked the part where users are running a node somewhere.
- jsheard 2y agoIt's generally taken to mean "close enough to the edge that latency is negligible regardless of where your users are".
- FireInsight 2y agoI guess edge is just a buzzword, maybe it is like a metaphor; if you think of the internet as a sphere users reach to for content, something being on the edge means you don't have to reach that hard, it's right there on top. Or maybe it means close to the edge, close to end-user devices. Serverless is definitely a misnomer, but it means that you don't 'own' the server your thing is running on, there are some restrictions and you can't run anything you could on an actual VPS or hardware box. So in a way the server is abstracted away. You just use resources, but those could be anywhere, running on any node of the edge network.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoRight after CenturyLink rebranded to Lumen, but before I heard about it, I clicked a buzzword-laden link looking for people involved in "Edge Computing". I had been writing vehicle traffic controller firmware and thought "hey, I guess I'm doing edge computing--out here at the curb--maybe I should check this out." Turns out, they meant installing modems in people's houses. Edge, it would seem, is a very versatile buzzword.
- toast0 2y agoI feel like Edge is more acceptable; running at a PoP is close to the edge; running inside an ISP network is even closer; it's not really achievable, but running in ISP managed modems or cellular base stations is pretty much the limit of plausible Edge computing. Serverless really should mean the client does the work, but it seems pretty equivalent to shared hosting. Dreamhost (and the shell account you used to get with an ISP!) was serverless before it was cool?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWhen I hear "Edge" I imagine that it keeps working if you remove the ISP (e.g. it'll still talk to with other stuff on the LAN) but it works better when the internet is available. Like bit torrent. I'm aware that what they usually mean is significantly less interesting.
- apitman 2y agoI think of it as the edge of the server side, ie the closest to the user where the service operator still controls the data. An edge function in a data center can hide information from unauthorized users. An edge function in a home would have a much harder time of pulling that off.
- bigs 2y agoEdge just means running on servers near you (eg. the closest AWS AZ) rather than the other side of the world. It’s still servers in data centres.
- crabmusket 2y agoBack when the Internet of Things was a hot new idea, "edge" did indeed refer to devices like phones and fridges. These days "edge" more commonly refers to the "edge of the cloud", i.e. still a datacenter, just not in us-east-1. Serverless also does not mean no servers, it means no sysadmins.
- ec109685 2y agoServerless means you don’t care about how many hosts you’re spread across.
- csomar 2y agoThe edge means it's stateless (not serverless) and running on multiple servers, so serving the customer from the closest one (at least in theory).