Edgility: Serverless Edge

I’m excited to share with you, for the first time, an important collaboration we did with AT&T Labs & Cloudify.

It won’t come to you as a surprise that AT&T is pushing hard towards 5G; 5G is not only bandwidth, and not only ultra-low-latency (<20msec).

5G is about innovation of new kind of services for consumers and business, services we cannot even imagine right now.

For now, you can think of:

• Value-added services for autonomous, connected cars (e.g. communication between cars, communication between car and intersection).
• Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” (2002) movie – target video advertising.
• Augmented & virtual reality.
• Video streaming optimization.
• HLS.
• and more.

How service provider can bring services that require ultra-low-latency ? they can try and bring the cloud much closer to the consumers – this is Edge Cloud.

But Edge Cloud has its own challenges:

1. DCs (Data-Centers) are few (~20 to 100, depend on the size) while Edges will be several thousands.
2. DCs have many computes, Edges are small in blueprint – how can we optimize the compute utilization to make the business case economic with good ROI.
3. And more.

Maybe we can answer some of these challenges with another very cool technology: Serverless.

If you’ve heard about Amazon Lambda and Greengrass services, or about Microsoft IOT Edge – it’s all about Serverless and a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS).

Instead of investing on the way your code is going to be deployed on servers, bring the code and the cloud provider will do the rest for you – when writing your code (your function) you don’t care about VMs, Containers or any other machine; if we can deliver the promise, it should speed up the process for business to concentrate on their core business.

Serverless has its advantages and drawbacks; drawbacks are mainly around the need of persistent processes. I might elaborate more on a dedicated post about Serverless.

Anyhow, what we did is to combine the two technologies, and together with our partners in crime AT&T Labs and Cloudify we’ve created: Edgility: Serverless Edge.

Do you want to hear more about it?

Start with a podcast we did explaining Edgility.

#Edge #Serverless #ONAP #Akraino #FaaS #PaaS #V2X #5G #AT&T #Cloudify #Orchestration

Stay tuned for much more very soon!

Eden