Widespread deployment of centralized clouds has changedthe way internet services are developed, deployed andoperated. Centralized clouds have substantially extended themarket opportunities for online services, enabled new entitiesto create and operate internet-scale services, and changedthe way traditional companies run their operations. However,there are types of services that are unsuitable for today’scentralized clouds such as highly interactive virtual andaugmented reality (VR/AR) applications, high-resolutiongaming, virtualized RAN, mass IoT data processing andindustrial robot control. They can be broadly categorized aseither latency-sensitive network functions, latency-sensitiveapplications, and/or high-bandwidth services. What thesebasic functions have in common is the need for a moredistributed cloud infrastructure-an infrastructure we call edgeclouds. In this paper, we examine the evolution of clouds, andedge clouds especially, and look at the developing market foredge clouds and what developments are required innetworking, hardware and software to support them.
展开▼
