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Edge Computing: Explained (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Verge, written by Paul Miller: In the beginning, there was One Big Computer. Then, in the Unix era, we learned how to connect to that computer using dumb (not a pejorative) terminals. Next we had personal computers, which was the first time regular people really owned the hardware that did the work. Right now, in 2018, we're firmly in the cloud computing era. Many of us still own personal computers, but we mostly use them to access centralized services like Dropbox, Gmail, Office 365, and Slack. Additionally, devices like Amazon Echo, Google Chromecast, and the Apple TV are powered by content and intelligence that's in the cloud -- as opposed to the DVD box set of Little House on the Prairie or CD-ROM copy of Encarta you might've enjoyed in the personal computing era. As centralized as this all sounds, the truly amazing thing about cloud computing is that a seriously large percentage of all companies in the world now rely on the infrastructure, hosting, machine learning, and compute power of a very select few cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM.
The advent of edge computing as a buzzword you should perhaps pay attention to is the realization by these companies that there isn't much growth left in the cloud space. Almost everything that can be centralized has been centralized. Most of the new opportunities for the "cloud" lie at the "edge." The word edge in this context means literal geographic distribution. Edge computing is computing that's done at or near the source of the data, instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn't mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you. Miller goes on to "examine what people mean practically when they extoll edge computing," focusing on latency, privacy and security, and bandwidth.
The advent of edge computing as a buzzword you should perhaps pay attention to is the realization by these companies that there isn't much growth left in the cloud space. Almost everything that can be centralized has been centralized. Most of the new opportunities for the "cloud" lie at the "edge." The word edge in this context means literal geographic distribution. Edge computing is computing that's done at or near the source of the data, instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn't mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you. Miller goes on to "examine what people mean practically when they extoll edge computing," focusing on latency, privacy and security, and bandwidth.
That's not going to happen.
Basically what it means is that Google will manage the software that is running on your devices. They will run whatever software they want on your devices without telling you what is going on. Besides "managed OS for IoT devices" this also means things like Google docs that can work in offline mode, that do most of their work on your device, but also sync with the cloud (as opposed to doing everything on the server thrrough rest APIs).
There is nothing new about this at all, but now there is a name for it, and people are building frameworks so even the dumbest programmers around can do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
examine what people mean practically when they extoll edge computing," focusing on latency, privacy and security, and bandwidth."
This sounds suspiciously like returning data from the cloud to my personal computer and the pendulum is swinging back again. In the 80's we had dumb terminals, in the 90's we had thin clients and then in the 2000's we got the cloud, all of these things were more or less the same thing. Dumb terminals and thin clients failed because of latency and bandwidth, the cloud will fail because of privacy and security.
Information Search, speech recognition, personal assistance, geographical services, etc.
10 years from now, some company is going to make a killing selling me a device that can do those things and not have to connect. This is how Google falls.
There is no way anyone is crazy enough to write those lines in all seriousness.
So as a matter of interest, why? Can you show a deliberate act where those 3 parties have abused or failed to secure your data? From the big three data leaks have ultimately resulted from users misconfiguring the services and nothing more. In the mean time there are Fortune 500 companies lining up to put secret and critical data on these services, and by that I mean shareprice moving data.
What makes your toaster so important?