Richard Beeson, CTO of OSIsoft, says cloud grew out of a need to scale compute, storage, and network for consumer applications and services. “The demands of (the) consumer world taught the software industry a whole lot about agility and scalability and reliability and responsiveness,” Beeson says. “The cloud grew out of the need to solve problems like worldwide search, selling all the books of the world, building the biggest yard sale ever, and sharing every conceivable cat antic. It also taught the world that physical things can be made more valuable through ‘software definition’, such as software-defined networks, software-defined storage, and software upgrades of cars. The ability to abstract the management, features, and functions from the physical layer yields agility to an otherwise physically defined world.”

“In fact, Cisco estimated that by next year alone, hyperscale data centers will represent 53% of all installed data center servers.”

Hyperscale cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are playing and will continue to play a key role in meeting the growing demand for cloud services. “As businesses across the globe place more effort on digitization efforts and expand their use of technology, these cloud providers will have an essential role in reducing the complexity that comes with managing the environments needed to support today’s digital business,” Owen explains. “The ability for these providers to handle the dramatic increase in data and traffic, plus their ability to scale quickly and integrate with other platforms is what differentiates them from other providers and ultimately gives them a competitive advantage.”

“However, the most important trend is the adoption of multi-cloud strategies by almost every major enterprise, including abstraction layers to eliminate vendor lock-in.”

However, not all computational needs can be addressed via cloud. Malladi points out there are connectivity, bandwidth, latency, and security concerns, and this is exactly where edge computing comes in.

Edge Trends

Predictions in the edge computing market suggest growth is in the forecast for the next several years. MarketsandMarkets expects the edge computing space to reach $9 billion by 2024, up from 2.8 billion in 2019. BCC Research aims a little higher, suggesting the global market for edge computing will hit $21 billion by 2023. And in one study, Edge Internet Economy: The Multi-Trillion Dollar Ecosystem Opportunity from consulting firm Chetan Sharma Consulting, the edge internet economy is forecast to reach more than $4 trillion by 2030.

FogHorn’s Malladi points to a couple of exciting trends in edge computing right now. “Using the power of AI (artificial intelligence) at the edge, machine-learning capabilities are moving beyond traditional analytics,” he says. “These new implementations, called Edge AI, allow machine-learning models to be continuously updated and automatically trained with new, meaningful data.”

Source: 2020 State of the Edge

Consider the following scenario. When organizations build machine-learning models, an assumption is made that the model will be accurate as long as the data patterns the model has been trained on remains true. If new data patterns emerge, or if the model has not been trained on all possible data sets or workflows, the model might be biased and provide inaccurate results. “A solution to this problem is to apply closed-loop machine-learning updates (meaning Edge AI) by detecting accuracy-level degradations and triggering automatic retraining,” explains Malladi. “Live data is then pushed back to a retraining module for model updates and subsequently, a new model is pushed back down to the edge to bring accuracy levels back to the original state. In summary, Edge AI helps organizations analyze live data streams and deliver intelligence at or near the source, leading to increased overall productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.”

Chetan Sharma, CEO of Chetan Sharma Consulting, says the edge market is just getting started, but it has been accelerating throughout 2020. “It is like the new gold rush, where everyone wants to own a piece of the business,” Sharma says. “There are many more participants in the value chain than just the cloud players, so the ecosystem will be more interesting and diverse.”

Sharma says edge access will become hugely important for latency-sensitive IoT services. The market, he adds, is being driven by industries like industrial and entertainment. Video analytics and AR (augmented reality) are other key drivers. The ability to push processing to the edge, rather than shipping all the data to the cloud for analytics offers huge bandwidth savings. To the list of market drivers, Malladi adds industries like green tech, automotive, and smart buildings. In green tech, efforts to take environmental responsibility and minimize carbon footprints are driving edge-computing implementations. “For example, fleet transportation organizations are beginning to deploy edge-based sustainability efforts to detect abnormal regen and idling events in realtime—ultimately reducing billions of pounds of CO2 emissions per year,” Malladi says.

Source: 2020 State of the Edge

In automotive, edge technology is helping players process the significant amounts of data today’s connected cars generate. “As the future of transportation with autonomous and connected vehicles depends on the creation of the required intelligence and processing capabilities to build and operate sophisticated, autonomous systems, edge computing has become a great avenue to gather, merge, process, and deploy sensor data more effectively,” he adds.

Modern smart buildings are also using edge computing to lower energy consumption, improve predictive maintenance, better security, increase occupant comfort and safety, and allow for better utilization of building assets and services. Rather than sending massive amounts of building data to the cloud for analysis, smart buildings can use edge capabilities for more responsive automation while reducing bandwidth costs and latency.

The Next Big Thing

In an email to Microsoft employees back in 2018, Satya Nadella, the company’s CEO, made it clear that intelligent cloud and intelligent edge are complementary parts of Microsoft’s strategy going forward. Mahadev Satyanarayanan, known as “Satya”, a professor of computer science at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University), says, in fact, the convergence of cloud computing and edge computing is nothing short of “the next big thing.”

“By ‘convergence’, I don’t mean that differences will disappear. Not at all,” Satya says. “Each will retain its distinct attributes and strengths. Rather, by ‘convergence’, I mean that edge-native applications will be created that leverage both edge computing and cloud computing for different facets of their execution.”

There is no substitute for the cloud for some applications. For a use case that has no critical timing constraints or bandwidth scalability issues, the cloud offers the lowest cost per unit of compute. “The ability to operationalize these costs is another big win,” Satya adds. “In terms of long-term archival storage of valuable data, there is no place safer than the cloud—possibly private cloud for very sensitive data, but the cloud nonetheless.”

Andre Fuetsch, CTO of network services at AT&T, says he also views cloud and edge as complementary. “Each plays a role in a business’s networking strategy,” Fuetsch explains. “For the super low-latency applications, bringing the processing power to the edge is probably the way to go, but less time-sensitive applications that might require a little more ‘oomph’ in computing could benefit from sticking with cloud computing. But as these technologies continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how businesses innovate with them. The future of the cloud and edge computing is being built right now, and it’s an area of focus with us and our customers.”

Combining that with the rise of 5G, and the nationwide 5G we expect to have this summer, we’re seeing new possibilities with our customers for mobile services we could only dream about five years ago.”