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What the f*** is the edge?

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Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#81

Post by petrikapu »

discodave wrote: post #46
feritkan wrote: post #31

For the record according to this link, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ AWS operates in 18 geographies (called) regions... These are not data centers. There are 55 availability zones (AZs) at AWS regions, and each AZ has at least 1 data center..12 more AZs at 4 more regions are also announced

Also, there are over 100 AWS CloudFront POPS: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/details/#infrastructure And you can do compute in CloudFront POPS with Lambda@Edge: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-edge.htm...

Only node.js available in Lambda@Edge

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#82

Post by setr »

Jedd wrote: post #58

> Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to cloud back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about ... You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical. The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the…

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 other side starts to make more sense..

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#83

Post by Jedd »

jayd16 wrote: post #69
Jedd wrote: post #58

> Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to cloud back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about ... You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical. The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the…

We already reached full circle when went from mainframe to cloud.

Indeed. I make a point of avoiding the c-word entirely, as no two people agree on what it actually means. Plus I started my IT career maintaining a mostly leased line (point to point) network infrastructure, coming into mainframes via FEPs.

The applications delivered by those systems, traversing low-speed (9600bps) links over many hundreds of kilometres felt (and probably were) more responsive than the HTTP-based applications that have, 30 years later, mostly replaced them. Soon after that there was the trend to distribute file & print servers to every branch office, and maintain a breathtakingly large library of desktop applications. A blink later and I was at a Gartner shindig in 2000 where they were convinced the Sun Ray was going to be The Next Big Thing. (It wasn't.) Rinse and repeat.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#84

Post by Dylan16807 »

perl4ever wrote: post #18
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the teleoperation companies at the moment. As far as I know. Worse still many are intending to gang onto the primary cellular infrastructure to perform the function. Which makes everything worse.

It's fine if you are going to have your cars remotely controlled with a latency > 150 ms while they operate autonomously as things happen in a shorter time frame. But the other way around seems insane. It's reminiscent of the way people have switched from "human drives, computer deals with emergencies" to "computer drives, human deals with emergencies" as though it was no big difference.

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.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#85

Post by Jedd »

setr wrote: post #82
Jedd wrote: post #58

> Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to cloud back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about ... You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical. The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the…

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?

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#86

Post by Dylan16807 »

DennisAleynikov wrote: post #12
altcognito wrote: post #5

I presume that nobody sane is sending critical self driving car decisions to the cloud.

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.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#87

Post by vinceguidry »

elvinyung wrote: post #72
vinceguidry wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fails the sniff test. Markets are made up of agents that want things. Computers only want what humans say they should want, so computers are simply the agents of humanity. You can't abstract out supply and demand, at least, not forever. Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable. Humans will act predictably for as long as it makes sense for…

I think there's some questions to be asked about this, but the main one is this claim: > Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable. The word "predictable". What does it mean to be predictable? Are periodic trends with micro-variations considered to be predictable? In that sense, might it not be possible to Fourier-decompose some time-series int…

If any other kind of agent can make market moves, then that agent has to supplant humans at the 'top'.

For example, the pet market is absurdly large. What drives this market? The actual needs of animals? Of course not. It's the wishes of humans that make that market as big as it is.

It doesn't even have to be that humans are smart enough to control the new market-playing agents. It can also be that human desire can so vastly dwarf whatever external agency has a wish to be in the market that the whole industry ends up catering the wishes of the humans.

Right now, human desire drives the market for robots. Can you even imagine a point at which robots could develop enough agency to even come close to supplanting the human desire for more and better robots? When does the tail stop wagging the dog here?

People sometimes forget the sheer scale of human economies. Sure, maybe your pet non-human agent might be able to command a few hundred thousand in market activity. Is it even going to be notable over all the other existing types of non-human agency already on the market, like pets and HFT?

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#89

Post by Dunedan »

WaxProlix wrote: post #63
apendleton wrote: post #19

> When e.g. AWS Cloudfront, Amazon's Content Delivery Network talks about "Edge Caching" it simply refers to the Amazon datacenter closest to whoever requests the site. Kind of? If by "datacenter" they mean the things they said earlier that AWS had 18 of, then no, not really. There are many more Cloudfront points of presence that there are AWS regions (over 100 of the former). In practice unless someone lives very cl…

It seems a bit nit-picky, but AWS has ~18 commercial regions , but far more datacenters. It's availability zone that's a data center (more or less), not a region. So for each region you end up with 3 to 5 data centers or something like that.

Even a single AZ might consist of multiple datacenters.

Re: What the f*** is the edge?

#90

Post by lifeisstillgood »

rhizome wrote: post #79
zackbloom wrote: post #15

We (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…

3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe borrow from physics to call it the Egress Horizon.

Would you mind expanding a little. Google has led me to a brand of window maker, and to of course, black hole event horizons but I am not clear on the specific egress horizon.

I can guess what you intended but would be interested in the specifics.

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