What Makes Something Edge Native?
GIGAOM, Friday, August 2nd, 2024
In simplistic definitions, the edge is characterized as simply moving workloads closer to end users to reduce network latency associated with clouds. While that is an important component, reducing the network latency is just a third of the process. What makes an edge is reducing compute, network, and storage-related latency.
Why is Edge in Demand?
Imagine that your cloud location is close to your end users, so the network latency is under 20 milliseconds. With the sizable footprint of cloud data centers worldwide, edge services would only really be needed for remote locations, and you would expect demand to be low. But that's not the case; we see a lot of demand for edge solutions, mainly because of the compute and storage-related latency components.
Compute latency dictates how long it takes for a request to be processed, from provisioning a compute instance to returning the result. Storage latency represents the time required to retrieve relevant data.