According to Moore’s Law, computing power doubles every 18 months, which means that society experiences new waves of every innovation almost every two years. We’ve seen this happen with mobile phones and personal computers, and will be seeing this soon with cloud computing with the concurrent rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). This phenomenon is known as Edge Computing.
According to Gartner’s 2017 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, Edge Computing is on the brink of an “innovation trigger”, driven by the continued embedding of microchips and sensors in everyday products including fitness trackers, manufacturing equipment, and self-driving automobiles. As the market continues to grow, Gartner expects additional use cases to float to the surface.
Edge Computing’s arrival is no surprise in the annals of technology, driven by several influences. These are:
- The proliferation of social media and digital transformation, which has driven customers to create more data than ever before. By the time the clock hits midnight tonight, over 500 thousand hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube from mobile devices, wearables, and more. There will be needed support for the media created in both networks and storage.
- The adoption of IoT in its current state, which is estimated at 20 billion devices. With artificial reality, machine learning, robotics, and big data scaling up over the next couple of years, Edge Cloud will need to develop in support of additional use cases.
- The implementation of microservices, which simplify individual applications into smaller operations. With data processing moving away from the traditional data center and closer to the Edge, microservices will enable faster data interpretation and usage.
- The need for bandwidth, which can’t happen as easily if IoT, self-driving, and wearable devices are far from data processing functions. Even with increased network capacity, remote data processing isn’t scalable and would decrease the value of such IoT devices in the long run.
So what’s the alternative? Edge Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift that enables every device, appliance, or gadget to communicate and share resources making them part of the solution for scaling of IoT. It allows drones and robots to harness their collective resources in industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, agriculture or mining, delivering real-time data and improving business efficiency. Some business cases have also yet to be revealed.
The good news here is that along with the rise of IoT, Edge Cloud software is also being developed concurrently. With the paradigm shift coming sooner rather than later, it’s up to the enterprise to be prepared to take on the challenge.
Prepare for the Future
Are you prepared for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing? See how Perficient can help you by chatting with one of our specialists at sales@perficient.com and download our DevOps guide below for more information.
