Edge Cloud – The Next Era of Computing

The first ‘enterprise server’ was arguably the Harvard Mark 1, a room-sized mainframe computer built by IBM in the 1940s. Since then, enterprise computing has gone through several cycles of centralization and decentralization. Mainframe Computing was the first cycle, starting from the 1940s til the 1980s. It was characterized by a large quantity of computing power in a single system, centralized at one location, and accessed by multiple users via terminals.

The second cycle of computing was Client-Server Computing from the 1980s til the 2010s. Client-Server Computing is a decentralized application architecture whereby the providers of an application service, known as servers, shares its resources with users, known as clients. Clients and servers communicate over a computer network such as a LAN or a WAN. Server virtualization was also a popular technology arising from this decentralized era of computing.

The following era of computing became centralized again, and was known as Cloud Computing. In this era of computing, servers were centralized in massive datacenters which were operated by cloud providers. Infrastructure resources such as server and storage, and application services such as databases, e-mail, analytics, etc. were delivered to users via a massive global network known as the Internet, or the cloud. This era of computing started in the 2010s and is popular til today.

So, what is the next era of computing? I believe that the next wave will be the Edge Cloud.

What is the “Edge Cloud”? The Edge Cloud term was first coined in 2014 and is a combination of two IT concepts – Edge Network and Cloud Computing. We know from previous eras that the next wave of computing will build on the past, not replace it. The Edge Cloud will build on the advancements gained in Cloud Computing. But instead of centralizing compute resources and services in a few large hyperscale cloud data centers, these decentralized resources will be brought closer to the users and workloads that need them. This is where the Edge Network comes in – the Edge Cloud will be a pervasive cloud computing platform available anywhere in the network, up until the edge of the network, and not just at its center.

The Edge Cloud is also a natural evolution of the Hybrid Cloud, but not identical to it. The Hybrid Cloud is an environment where applications are running in two or more different clouds – usually an on-premise private cloud, and an off-premise public cloud. The Edge Cloud is different in the sense that it will be a single cloud platform, available both on- and off-premises, not a forced combination of two disparate platforms.

The benefits of the Edge Cloud are numerous. Firstly, it will allow the cloud resources to be deployed closer to where the data is being generated. This is particularly important for IoT and AI/ML use cases which demand immediate processing of data being created in real-time. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2022, over 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside of a traditional centralized data center or cloud.

Secondly, Edge Cloud will give an IT Director the freedom to choose where they want to place their workloads. Instead of being forced to use their own company data centers which will be in a handful of locations, or hyperscale cloud data centers in limited locales, IT Directors will have the ability to place their applications closer to the users who need them for the best performance and cost. 

Edge Clouds will be housed in edge data centers, a smaller, nimbler version of the large hyperscale cloud data centers of today. Edge clouds will be capable of being deployed in a wider variety of locations – from small offices to on-site containerized data centers – in order to bring computing capacity closer to the data and the devices generating it. High-speed networking will be a major characteristic of the Edge Cloud, and this will be aided by the accelerated growth of mobile 5G network infrastructure. The Edge Cloud platform also needs to be pervasive, with no difference to the software stack or how it is used, whether it is deployed at the center or the edge of the cloud.

Today, both traditional IT vendors and hyperscale cloud providers recognize that the Edge Cloud is the way forward, and there is a race to join the enterprise data center with the public cloud. Traditional IT vendors are forming alliances with public cloud providers so that their on-premise solutions can easily link to a public cloud resource. Conversely, public cloud providers are quickly coming out with their own hardware solutions to be placed inside the enterprise data center which can be connected back to their clouds.

One company which has a unique take on the Edge Cloud is Zadara. Zadara has created a cloud platform which provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service in the form of compute and storage resources. Zadara storage services are universal – block, file and object storage resources can be created from the same platform at the same time. Zadara compute resources support both traditional VMs, public cloud APIs, containers, as well as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). This cloud platform can be deployed both on-premise and in the public cloud with no differences in terms of hardware or software, providing a true ’any application, any data type, anywhere’ experience.

Zadara also pioneered the Federated Edge network – a combination of Zadara-operated public cloud data centers, co-location data centers, and service provider data centers – offering Zadara Edge Cloud services all over the world. The Zadara Federated Edge cloud is available from nearly 80 unique data centers today, more than some of the largest hyperscale public cloud providers in the world. This allows Zadara to deliver cloud compute and storage resources even to smaller cities and countries to alleviate data sovereignty and performance concerns. Best of all, a new Zadara cloud site can be easily stood up in a matter of a days with minimal investments in infrastructure and space.

We are clearly in the era of the Edge Cloud and I am excited at what the future will bring. The cycle is just beginning and already we can see many positives - from improved processing and performance to wholly new services and solutions. The future is certainly bright!