ASK HN: What is edge-computing and how to think of it beyond the fundaments?

We (the company I work for) are looking at it from an IoT perspective. There’s a lot of compute that the devices we deploy just can’t handle, but we need the low latency and regional/geographic context to process appropriately. We’ve considered using some of the CDNs and cloud compute at the edge but even then that wasn’t quite capable enough for us, so we have deployed our own compute units to our own edge locations to run our workloads (mostly computer vision and aggregations). There’s some roll up data that gets reported upstream but most of it goes back to the devices for use there.

(I’m being deliberately vague here for business reasons, please forgive me.)

Edge computing = embedded devices. Think self-driving cars where privacy, performance and real-time requirements make the cloud unusable. Yes, it's a stupid buzzword coined to sell stuff to PHBs.

Imagine some installation on the edge of flat Earth. Joke.

It could be oil or gas platform, or it could be some scientific installation - may be automatic weather monitoring platform. Or it could be surveillance system for these oil platform, with computer vision applications, plus database to store gathered info.

First computers made for datacenters in cities or for corporate offices.

To be more exact, first computers where made for telecoms standards, because in telecoms where large volumes for telecom equipment, when upgrades telecom generation, usually new eq was smaller than old, so they accepted to rent volume to 3rd persons.

Telecom datacenters usually have reliable power supply, air conditioner, and some standards on power, on size/weight, on networking, on heat waste.

Also appear corporate dcs, which usually avoid some telecom standards, but mostly they copied telecom.

In many corporate dcs create their own specialized configurations, usually three types - app server (number crunch), storage (many disk drives) and database, also some use universal platforms, and now added GPU or other number accelerators.

Now appear new class of applications, where also need computing power, and they have some constraints, but standards does not exist yet.

For these new applications traditionally used typical desktops or even notebooks, but this is not enterprise way, they are not reliable, not good suitable, and expensive to use, and that's why appear new class - edge computing.

As I know, mot edge computing devices are essentially notebooks platforms, but in rugged cases and without display and without keyboard, just mainboard with integrated interfaces, but they mostly specialized configurations to save space. In some edge computers I seen integrated battery.