Where is all your stuff?
I don’t mean the odds and ends shoved in your wardrobe or under your bed -
where is your digital stuff?
Emails, photos, documents -
the collections of ones and zeros that make up your electronic life.
They might be on your phone, your laptop, your external hard-drive,
but these days they’re likely to be somewhere else too:
The Cloud.
Today, a huge amount of our data exists in the cloud -
stored on a cluster of unknown servers... somewhere,
but available wherever and whenever we want it,
via the marvels of high speed internet.
Cloud computing has had a huge impact
on the way businesses and individuals use technology,
enabling more reliable data storage, better collaboration,
and countless other benefits.
But as fantastic a tool as it is, it does have its limits -
and as we ask more and more from the devices we use,
and from the internet in general,
it’s inevitable that we’re going to need other technologies at our disposal.
But to understand why, what those technologies are,
and the benefits they’re going to bring to our lives,
we need to draw a map.
Let’s start with me.
Sitting in my home office, I click a link to download a file from the cloud.
The request leaves my laptop, and bounces its way across the internet,
ending up at the server the file is stored on -
that could be a thousand miles away, or five thousand miles away.
The server sends back the file, which arrives at my laptop within seconds.
And at the very same moment,
millions of other people are doing exactly the same thing,
sending requests and files pinging across the cloud.
Perfect: cloud computing in action.
Where’s the problem?
Well, there isn’t one...
yet.
The thing is though,
this whole process is essentially structured the same way today
as it was when the internet was first designed in the 1970s.
And it has lasted surprisingly well -
in 2019 there were around 15 billion internet-connected devices worldwide.
But by 2025, this number is expected to reach 150 billion -
so realistically a 900% increase in capacity over the course of 6 years
is likely to benefit from a better way of organising things -
an architectural overhaul.
And the name for this new approach is edge computing.
To see why it’s called that, we need to go back to our map.
The idea is to move the data that I was requesting as close to me,
out here on the edge of the network, as possible.
Doing so makes for a shorter round trip for my data request,
meaning I get my file much faster.
But while that is great,
it’s actually only one small part of the much, much bigger picture here.
Because we don’t just use the cloud for storage -
we also use it for computing.
For an example of this, think of voice assistants.
When you ask Siri to set a timer, or tell Alexa to play your awesome 80s playlist,
the speech recognition involved
in understanding what you’ve said is a complicated business.
In the past, it required more processing power
than your phone or echo device could muster,
and the solution was to utilise cloud computing –
outsourcing the job by uploading the voice recording to a server in the cloud,
which would crunch the required numbers
and send the right instruction back to your device.
But as of late 2021,
both Siri and Alexa have moved this process from the cloud to the edge.
The very edge -
doing all speech recognition on-device.
This has only been made possible by the newest generation of high-powered,
low-energy-use, low-cost computer chips,
and while as a behind-the-scenes change it might not sound like that big a deal,
it’s indicative of a wider, cross-industry shift to edge computing
which has awesome potential.
You see, the main benefit of moving computing to the edge is speed -
a process that might have taken seconds via the cloud could now take milliseconds
and this kind of improvement is going to be vital
for some of the most exciting technologies in our future
one example being driverless cars.
Autonomous vehicles produce a huge amount of data,
all of which needs to be processed as quickly as possible
and here, cloud computing simply isn’t a viable option.
Travelling at a hundred kilometres per hour,
a split-second delay between sensing an obstacle and the car applying the brakes
could mean the difference between life and death.
By processing that data on board the car,
latency will be minimised, enabling the car to brake or swerve in time.
This isn’t all a done deal yet though.
At the moment, demand for these chips is drastically outstripping supply,
so we might have to wait a little longer
for edge computing to be rolled out more widely.
And even when that does happen,
edge computing isn’t going to replace the cloud;
there’s still a huge need to host the kind of workloads not suitable for the edge.
But to unlock the full potential of the technologies on our horizon
- the science-fiction future just around the corner -
it’s clear we’re going to require the kind of speed
that can only be achieved at the edge.