Computing Types for the Internet of Things • Hacker News Board

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#11

Post by krapp » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 12:22 AM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #2

As a consumer/prosumer/user of some IoT devices, the compute model I prefer is probably most closely aligned with what the author calls the "Fog" model. For devices at my home, I want: * No data to leave my personal private network, except to third-party APIs for necessary information to fulfill my requests. If I have a smart agent device, for example, and I ask it to tell me the movies playing at my local theater, i…

>Ha. You'll get a proprietary black box that steals all of your data, eats all of your bandwidth, offers no public API and stores everything in the cloud, and you'll like it.

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#12

Post by photojosh » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 12:26 AM UTC

It took me far too long to work out that "fog" is a "cloud" that's right next to you, and hence "fog computing" is a local cloud. Haha. Of course, that made "mist", a thin fog (?) make sense too.

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#13

Post by photojosh » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #5

noobiemcfoob wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're view seems too informed by your technical background. I can't imagine a rise in home servers to facilitate IoT as most customers will never have that level of interest in IoT products unless this is a type of product installed and maintained by a trained technician. Most applications don't justify that level of involvement. This is the primary reason for doing compute and data storage away from the edge device…

>The edge device has to be dead simple that someone with hardly any technology background can place it and set it up. This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. They're a royal pain in the ass to set up and use right now. Smartphones were kind of like this too before the first iPhone. There's nothing except that really preventing their widespread adoption. It's just that nobody's designed a really gr…

> This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers.

I don't agree. There'd be someone at least even tackling the problem, if there was actually a value proposition in it. The closest I can think of is Synology NASes, I suppose you roll the edge gateway into one too and that's your home server?

Thinking about what I use my home server for: media library, and backups. Both of those have been (mostly) supplanted by streaming and online services respectively, so I'm struggling to justify the home server even for the electricity to run it... but it is shortly to become an "IoT" gateway too (running Homebridge) since I agree with the top comment that it's best when as little data as possible leaves my local network.

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#14

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #2

As a consumer/prosumer/user of some IoT devices, the compute model I prefer is probably most closely aligned with what the author calls the "Fog" model. For devices at my home, I want: * No data to leave my personal private network, except to third-party APIs for necessary information to fulfill my requests. If I have a smart agent device, for example, and I ask it to tell me the movies playing at my local theater, i…

[deleted]

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#15

Post by pratumlabs » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 3:01 AM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #2

As a consumer/prosumer/user of some IoT devices, the compute model I prefer is probably most closely aligned with what the author calls the "Fog" model. For devices at my home, I want: * No data to leave my personal private network, except to third-party APIs for necessary information to fulfill my requests. If I have a smart agent device, for example, and I ask it to tell me the movies playing at my local theater, i…

Your dream is not too far away from reality. Devices like Mozilla's Things Gateway (https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/) represent some of the most ideal fog nodes as they are inexpensive and fairly powerful. Not too long ago there was even a research project called Paradrop (https://paradrop.org/) which made a fog node out of a consumer-grade router. My company is working on modeling software right now for Fog deployments and hope to use the knowledge we gain to build our own fog computing solution. Our first application will likely be either a fog-based filesystem (already done by researchers within Princeton's Edge Lab) or a Fog-based backup / NAS solution. It'll be a while before we get to this stage, but it's emerging from the mist so to speak.

Also for anyone interested in how the Cloud, Edge, and Fog computing models differ, I wrote a blog post about this topic (http://pratumlabs.com/blog/2018/01/what-is-fog-computing/) a few weeks ago.

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#16

Post by crdoconnor » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 8:31 AM UTC

photojosh wrote: post #13

crdoconnor wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The edge device has to be dead simple that someone with hardly any technology background can place it and set it up. This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. They're a royal pain in the ass to set up and use right now. Smartphones were kind of like this too before the first iPhone. There's nothing except that really preventing their widespread adoption. It's just that nobody's designed a really gr…

> This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. I don't agree. There'd be someone at least even tackling the problem, if there was actually a value proposition in it. The closest I can think of is Synology NASes, I suppose you roll the edge gateway into one too and that's your home server? Thinking about what I use my home server for: media library, and backups. Both of those have been (mostly) supplant…

There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa.

There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users and it could have privacy settings that are designed to put the users in the driving seat rather than features designed to foment addiction, oversharing and selling eyeballs.

For people who take a lot of digital photos and videos, local backup/data sync is simply always going to be faster than equivalent online services, so there's an 'in' to the chicken/egg problem.

I think the fact that this hasn't happened yet is because hardware companies tend to suck at software, software companies tend to suck at hardware and hardware companies that don't suck at design are pretty rare.

Re: Computing Types for the Internet of Things

#17

Post by photojosh » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 12:11 AM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #16

photojosh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the main thing preventing adoption of home servers. I don't agree. There'd be someone at least even tackling the problem, if there was actually a value proposition in it. The closest I can think of is Synology NASes, I suppose you roll the edge gateway into one too and that's your home server? Thinking about what I use my home server for: media library, and backups. Both of those have been (mostly) supplant…

There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa. There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users a…

> There's a bit of a chicken/egg problem. If there were a thriving app ecosystem for home servers there would be a lot more demand for them and vice versa.

Absolutely. Where we disagree is that there's actually applications that would significantly benefit from being hosted on a home server as opposed to online servers or on-device.

> There are tons of apps which would simply be better on home servers because the advertising imperative is gone so once the ecosystem was kickstarted it would gain its own momentum. E.g. a locally run open source 'facebook' could have its feed tailored by the users and it could have privacy settings that are designed to put the users in the driving seat rather than features designed to foment addiction, oversharing and selling eyeballs.

There's been a number of attempts to make such a project, and they've all failed to gain any momentum. The difficult part of this problem is indeed "kickstarting the ecosystem", not any of that other stuff.

> For people who take a lot of digital photos and videos, local backup/data sync is simply always going to be faster than equivalent online services, so there's an 'in' to the chicken/egg problem.

Yes, but for 90% of people they do their photo work on a single computer, and plug in an external USB drive to do backups. That's quite simple to do, so the difficulty is demonstrating a real benefit to a server-based system that makes up for the extra cost. Apple's AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products actually delivered this solution, but were niche enough sales that they couldn't be bothered continuing with them.