What is edge computing and how is it changing the world?

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is getting smarter day by day. With the improvements in
technology, the prices of this hardware is steadily falling and becoming widely accessible by all
socioeconomic classes. By 2020, it is estimated that the world will own 5.6 billion IoT devices,
and will be used across governments, enterprises and individuals. All these devices will use
some form of edge technology to transfer data. It is for this reason that major companies in
device manufacturing, network operations and cloud computing are proactively investing largely
in Edge Computing.

What is Edge Computing?

Good internet connectivity is important for IoT devices to function effectively. Since IoT devices
are cloud-only technology, they push data to the cloud via a sensor which then travels to a data
center that is miles away followed by a subsequent delay before it reaches the end user. Simple
sensors and smart cloud solutions are generally deployed in tandem and work effectively as
long as there is good connectivity with data centers. In some IoT devices, images and video is
sent for real-time processing, and any loss of connectivity will result in a poor experience for the
user due to downtime or loss of data.

Many developers argue that this bottleneck can be taken care of if devices were just made
smarter. If they are able to collect, process, store data and have resilient networking
capabilities, IoT devices could be absolutely autonomous. This in turn would mean less
bandwidth would be used by IoT devices and completely avoiding the need for a “fat pipe” for
transmission. This would be useful for remote areas where connectivity is a problem. By
reducing the dependency on the Cloud for critical computing, these autonomous devices will
experience minimum down time. With the ever-decreasing cost of hardware, these autonomous
devices are not a distant reality. The study and development of applications and solutions for
such autonomous devices to enhance the capability of the IoT spectrum via the cloud is called
Edge Computing.

How can Edge Computing help us?

Edge computing has ushered in the age of real-time computing, smart devices and remote
computing. Edge computing has allowed the possibility of computing capability near devices.
This has helped increase versatility and almost real-time decision making for critical scenarios.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how edge computing has revolutionized business:

1. On-boarding old and new remote assets for the digital journey.
2. Reusing of existing devices for deriving insights from raw data.
3. Critical decision-making in real time.
4. Remote control of data.
5. Ensuring security and compliance (for on-premise assets automatically).
6. Enabling low footprint on cloud services leading to cost saving.
Similarly, edge computing has made a lot of difference in technology as well:

1. Adhering to industry protocols such as CAN bus, Modbus or OPC for connecting assets
inside the edge location.
2. Utilizing standardized technologies such as Docker to adapt to different platform architectures
such as ARM, x64, and x86. It also helps in code reusability and easy deployment.
3. Providing built-in resilience and fault tolerance mechanism for processing.
4. Enabling intelligent data aggregation for difficult to reach locations such as oil rigs, and
hydroelectric dams.
5. Utilizing local computation for providing machine learning and analytics capabilities, if
available.
6. Enabling large-scale IoT deployment at a global level as well as providing Over The Air (OTA)
updates for runtime and computing upgrades.

The leaders in edge computing are organizations such as AWS Greengrass, Azure IoT Edge,
and IBM Edge Analytics. A lot of emerging open source microkernel runtimes like Apache
Edgent, EdgeX Foundry and Liota are supporting different forms of edge computing. Clearly
there is a lot of innovation in the edge computing field, and it's only a matter of time when these
autonomous IoT devices will invade our personal lives and workspaces.