There is no doubt that cloud computing has been the buzzword for several years and will continue to dominate the IT and business world for quite a long time. In the cloud computing world, the computation resources, storage, algorithm, application and big data analytics are centralized and their service is provided to the consumer just like water and electric power.
However, in reality, cloud computing cannot satisfy every type of information exchange, storage, and real-time analytics need. In the future, more a
nd more (perhaps millions of devices and machines) will be connected and are becoming more intelligent. Many enterprise users hope to have a local data center to distribute the IoT (internet of things) workload and to find a way to connect with centralized cloud computing.
This is called Fog computing.
To the enterprise, there are some drawbacks to the single cloud computing architecture as it requires high-speed bandwidth and produces a time lag.
Imagine there are tens of thousands of devices in a factory and we want to collect all the temperature and pressure data, in real-time for proper monitoring and decision. Here, Fog computing will be an effective way to locally centralized the data center and computation engine. Hence, Fog computing is built similarly to cloud within the edge location, but it still takes advantage of the cloud. Rather than straight cloud computing, this is more a hybrid model.
The below image from Forbes explains the logical layers between device, fog and cloud.
The term “fog computing” was first time raised by Cisco and now this technology is being developed and pushed ahead by some large companies such as ARM, Cisco, Dell , Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University. They are the founding members of the OpenFog Consortium.
People believe Fog computing is important because of the growth of the Internet of Things.
Will Fog Computing become next buzzwords? We will have to wait and see.
