There's A Better Way To Think About The Edge Than Near And Far
Gestalt IT, Tuesday, August 8,2023
Near Edge and far Edge are utilitarian terms - they tell us where the Edge 'is'. Namely, the near edge tells us it is most likely on-premises, such as a hardware deployment in a brick-and-mortar store, while the far Edge can be a couple of hundred miles away, like with a Cloud or CDN.
I have previously mentioned that the purpose of the Edge is to support near-real-time processing. Generally speaking, we perceive responses as being real-time when they are returned in under 20 milliseconds. Whether the Edge is near or far doesn't matter as long as my workloads are not further away than 20ms roundtrip.
The major distinction between near Edge and far Edge use cases is the flow of data. For the far Edge (Edge Platforms, CDNs, and Clouds), you would push data onto the end users. That means that you deliver videos, support real-time personalization of user sessions, optimize website performance, and deliver gaming experiences.