Edge computing set to grow with convergence of five technologies

摘要

Edge computing is a growing technology field that exploits computing at local and edge locations before typically connecting and communicating with the cloud. Often this has to do with the sheer volume of data generated at the edge and which would not be feasible or sensible to send to the cloud when it can be first processed at source before sending select data to the cloud. The setting up of the Linux Foundation Edge (LF Edge) by the Linux Foundation in January 2019, follows the success of its Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has already attracted more than 60 premier and general-level members and onboarded several open source projects. LF Edge aims to create an open source edge framework independent of hardware, cloud, and OS. Ovum is seeing the vendor community ramp up their edge computing activity as the rise of five technologies and factors are converging on the edge: 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-native computing technologies (microservices, containerization, and DevOps), increased compute power available in the edge, and the reduction of the cost of computing at the edge. What the edge constitutes will vary across players. For a large public cloud provider, the edge might be a data center, whereas for a car manufacturer, the edge could be a vehicle. LF Edge says the edge is defined by devices that are local, possibly mobile but must have low-latency responses in less than 20ms. The mobile phone is excluded by LF Edge from its scope by having an established technology stack, but the definition works well for a broad range of edge cases.