Did the terminology come from "edge routers"? Those are simply the last router before the device which uses the network.
What the f*** is the edge?
171–180 of 188 posts
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#172We (Cloudflare) have largely stopped talking about the 'edge' for some of the reasons cited in the article. 1. No one actually knows where it is or what it means. 2. It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly). 3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to. We would rath…
It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly). Yes. You do not do hard real time over the public Internet. (I've actually had the experience of driving a full-sized vehicle over WiFi. When we built our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004, we had the test capability of driving it remotely over W…
You can do hard-realtime over the circuit-switched substrate of the public Internet, though. "Two tin-cans and string" (i.e. two modems and the PSTN network) still works surprisingly well for (low-bandwidth) real-time control across vast distances. You can even get a decent hard-realtime SLA (much better than that of wi-fi or cellular data service) when one of the ends is a cell phone on 3G with its headphone jack plugged into a modem.
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#173I think OP is missing the point here. As he being the sales rep, the only valid answer would have been "Yes, it's on the edge.". It is a question dedicated to find out if you yourself think the product is good enough or how well you think it positions itself with the competition. Maybe it's just me being stupid here, but I find it funny how the whole discussion here has turned into a technical debate, which the origi…
Author here: When talking to an investor you are only a "sales rep" to some degree. You are the owner of a company looking to raise funding by selling a certain percentage of shares, so much is true - but the mindset is more one of finding the right partner. Given a promising enough vision and execution there's no shortage of interested VCs and the challenge is in picking the right one for the long term. All VCs offe…
I totally agree with your points here. But just as few others have pointed out, it looks more like a "shiny object syndrome" or it could also be a bit of that the customer is not an expert of the software field and feels like he/she's gotta bring something to the table to sound credible.
Your blog post sent me far into memory lane. I still remember a case where I was a starting entrepreneur and I was selling a website remake. The customer asked me if our CMS's database was relational. He clearly did not even have a clue what that actually meant, but neither did I :) I knew it was "most probably totally irrelevant" to the whole case (just as you seemed to ponder), but my uncertainty showed. I was maybe under my 20s then, though I was very confident I could deliver. But I was no salesman, more of an enthusiast geek with a vision.
What he was basically asking me was "why should I pick your product instead of all the others? Is this person credible?". It caught me so off-guard, that I kind of froze back then and wasn't able to bring the conversation to a level where our product would be compared to the competitors. Focus on the good things etc. Maybe he did it just check, if I was actually aware of any competition!
I didn't get that contract. I still remember it as a lesson learned in many levels and your blog post somehow reminded me of that moment. Can't really say if they are comparable, but there you have it :)
ps. My first thought today could be more like "what is this person scared of the most in this situation, where does this kind of question stem from?". A great sales rep might ask that question directly back. Cheers!
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#174The edge, as used most often in my experience, is the entry point that connects the public and private internet. It rarely has anything to do with location (in almost all cases it's implied the edge is regionalized to be the closest data center to the target). For AWS: a Lambda at the edge, for example, may be a Lambda behind an API Gateway that acts as the public entrypoint into infrastructure behind a VPC. That Lam…
On AWS that’s a somewhat confusing way to put it since there is Lambda@Edge, which allows you to run Lambdas to handle/manipulate CloudFront CDN requests at their edge locations.
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was only used as an example of something you CANNOT do with such high latency. It was not implying some company out there is actually using a high latency server for real time processing
It's a pretty bad example of that, though. There are enormous problems involved in the idea of remote piloting a car, but a 150ms feedback loop is no big deal. It's slightly better than a human. Especially if you look at the latency of one-server-per-continent, which is still extremely far from "edge": you get something like 50ms or better. That's easily good enough to control anything a human could control by hand.
Pretty sure there are systems where one would struggle to regulate with 20Hz loop that humans can do. At least with easy methods like linearized PID. For example an inverted pendulum
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't necessarily have to be due to an ill-decision; thick/thin client cycling can be seen as the obvious result of network/compute cost effectiveness ration swapping. When network is cheaper, thin clients make more sense; when compute is cheaper, then it makes more sense to have it local, and thus thick clients. And due to diminishing returns + economies of the scale, as the market starts investing in one, the…
You may be right, but I'm wary of the implication that 'the market' is rational. Also, if the market leans more towards network or compute (I'm not sure that's a useful distinction, but I'll run with it for now) wouldn't the economies of scale necessarily continue to accentuate the initial trend, rather than induce an oscillating pattern?
You're right, my mistake; economies of scale would keep the trend, and diminishing returns dissolves it
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time. The big deal is the lack of reliability on that connection.
> 150ms is no big deal. That's on par with top-notch human reaction time. Comparing a single component latency in technology to human reaction time is a complete straw man i see far too often. (I'm not blaming you, you are probably just repeating it). 150ms _is_ a good human reaction time, but in technological terms that includes sensor, network, processor, network bus, actuator and finally any physical latency of ac…
I evaluated those and left them out on purpose, because it doesn't change the answer. You can sample most sensors extremely fast, but let's say our camera is only 100Hz. 10ms there, 10ms for our processing loop, 0.5ms on each end for the LAN if you insist on it not being included in the 150, 5ms for a not-even-impressive actuator to affect the wheels... Now you're still under 180ms and you're still beating an average human.
Being 'noticable' is a totally different thing. A human can notice single digit millisecond differences in timing. With adding control latency, there are two main problems, and neither one affects a system designed for remote control.
One is that you're not used to it, and you have to undo a lifetime of learning to adjust. This goes the other way too, it would be very disorienting to magically make someone's body react 100ms sooner to every attempt at movement.
The other big problem is that your movements and button presses no longer line up with the audiovisual feedback. It's really disorienting, and is going to make you miss a lot of shots in that FPS. If you could detach your hands and put them at the other end of the link somehow, that problem would be a lot easier. You already understand how to compensate for the latency of your fingers. You'd still have to get used to it, though.
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#178I too enjoy thick butts.
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#179> Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to butt back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about: In a world of increasingly ubiquitous computing power we are well advised to reflect on where our computation happens and how we can make the most efficient use of the resources at our disposal. Which is exactly why we the cynics say we've come fu…
In case anybody else is confused like I was: there is a plug-in for browsers that turns all mention of “cloud” to “butt”. Parent apparently has this plugin installed, and thus the “to butt” part is “to cloud”. (Users of said plugin will see me just saying butt a lot here :P )
Interestingly enough I didn't even notice it until reading your comment. Looks like I have a "butt" to "cloud" translator in my brain.
Re: What the f*** is the edge?
#180I tried to search "ETSI MEC" in hackers news and got no results.
https://portal.etsi.org/Portals/0/TBpages/MEC/Docs/Mobile-ed...
It is one of the definitions of edge computing, any comments?