What is Edge Computing?
Consider where the computing power has been located throughout the years.
In the 1950s, computers were housed in government, educational, and commercial laboratories. All computing work was done in these centralized locations. The next step was connecting to these mainframe computers through a terminal. These terminals had little computing power themselves, but allowed people to access the mainframe. Eventually personal computers came along, bringing computing power into individual homes.
Computers were then connected to one another in private networks. Businesses had their own servers on location and shared drives where documents were stored and could only be write-accessed by a single computer at a time. These servers and shared drives were managed onsite.
The internet was built by connecting these smaller networks together. Cloud computing came next. Instead of having a server in your closet, servers, storage, and more are enabled through the internet. In the cloud, you don't own your server and maintain it yourself, you rent a server from a cloud provider and control it
Edge computing can be thought of as the cloud coming to your doorstep or a localized cloud. Maybe it is like having the cloud in your closet.
Edge locations are highly distributed. When you use an edge location nearby, you get the benefit of high bandwidth and extremely low latency. The compute power is located at the edge location, so even slim IoT devices can do amazing things if they are connected to an edge location.
What Can I Expect from Edge Computing?
Anything that can benefit from high computing power and real time decisions is either made possible by edge computing or made better through edge computing. This technology has the potential to impact a variety of industries including advertising, healthcare, education, travel, entertainment, construction and more.
AR (augmented reality) games? Edge Computing.
Smart cities? Edge Computing.
Telemedicine? Edge Computing.
How Can I Be Part of the Next Technological Shift?
Sound interesting?
If you want to be among the first to build edge applications, please consider joining AlefEdge's ambassador team. You will have early access to our upcoming APIs, support from the DevRel team, promotion of your projects, and an honorarium in the form of gift certificates and other prizes.
Want to try our first public API? Check out our tutorial.
Top comments (0)