Читать книгу Understanding Infrastructure Edge Computing - Alex Marcham - Страница 13

Few could have guessed the impact the internet would have on us all at its inception. Today, the internet and the services it provides are essential for billions of people across the world. It is a primary source of communication with friends, family, and our communities; it is the primary way in which we access many essential services, as well as the way that increasing numbers of us go to work, pursue our educational goals, and access sources of entertainment, all on demand.

We did not get to this point by accident. Although the current state of the internet could not have been fully foreseen decades ago, it is due to the continuous efforts of skilled and driven people from across many different disciplines that the modern internet is able to support us as it does today. The story of the internet is not one of a single grand original design; it is one of consistent iteration and ingenuity to adapt to new technical and business challenges which have emerged over the decades.

As they have in the past, new and emerging use cases are driving the evolution of internet and data centre technology. This is resulting in new generations of infrastructure which are reimagining how the internet that we all use on a daily basis should be designed, deployed, and operated as a whole.

Distributed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are set to permanently reshape how many industries, from healthcare and retail to manufacturing and construction, operate due to their ability to enhance the decision‐making process and automate difficult tasks with extraordinary speed and precision. City‐scale internet of things (IoT) and cyber‐physical systems provide machines the means to interact physically with our world in ways that have been impossible or impractical to achieve before, supported by fifth generation (5G) cellular network connectivity and new versions of cloud computing, which are able to support high‐bandwidth, low‐latency, and real‐time use cases.

The key element underpinning all of these areas of advancement in both technology and business is infrastructure edge computing. It is one thing to demonstrate a use case in a laboratory environment where everything is a known variable; it is quite another to then operate a commercial service in the real world with all of the messy constraints that introduces, from cost to performance to timescales.

Edge computing is one of the most frequently mentioned emerging technologies, which many believe will make a significant impact on the landscapes of both technology and business during the decade of the 2020s. The concept seems simple: By moving compute resources as close as possible to their end users, theoretically the latency between a user and their application can be reduced, the cost of data transport can be minimised, and these two factors combined will make new use cases practical.

But what really is edge computing, beyond the hype, marketing material, and hyperbole that always accompany any major technological shift? With so many competing definitions of even the most basic elements of the technology, can we succinctly define concepts and terminology which allow us to have a consistent understanding of the challenges we are trying to solve together as an industry?

What are the key factors driving edge computing, and what must a solution provide in order to solve key technical and business challenges? How does edge computing really replace, compete with, or augment cloud computing? What is infrastructure edge computing, and does it stand alongside the traditional regional, national, and on‐premises data centre, or does it seek to replace them entirely?

This book aims to answer all of these questions and provide the reader with a solid foundation of knowledge with which to understand how we got to this inflection point and how infrastructure edge computing is a vital component of the next‐generation internet – an internet which enables suites of new key use cases that unlock untapped value globally across many different industries.