
Announcing AWS Wavelength for delivering ultra-low latency applications for 5G - adunk
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcing-aws-wavelength-delivering-ultra-low-latency-applications-5g/
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allthecybers
IMO, this was one of the more interesting releases at re:invent this year. It
seems AWS is really making a move to deploy AWS outside of the Region.

AWS Outposts let you have AWS on-prem, AWS Local Zones puts the AWS data plane
closer to users and now AWS Wavelength brings AWS services to the edge of the
5G network.

Although I can't personally conceive of all the use cases, I can definitely
imagine there are a million different applications that could benefit from
being deployed that close to customers.

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mindslight
This feels like another positive sign that the de/centralized pendulum is
about to swing back, as the centralizers are running out of momentum.

If low latency were actually in demand, this would be reflected in our popular
runtimes and frameworks. As it stands, opening phone apps can take seconds,
embedded devices shamelessly have hundreds of milliseconds touchscreen lag,
and commercial webpages spend much time loading a host of malware and
backhauling surveillance data.

Users do enjoy low latency, just not with enough importance to prevent the
market from adding bloat up to what they're willing to tolerate. If this
innovation just results in 10-20ms to load more surveillance scripts, that's
not particularly noteworthy!

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dharma1
While I am all for the decentralisation trend where it matters, I think you
miss some interesting use cases for this, like running compute intensive
software on the server instead of on the client. Latency often matters in use
cases like this, as evidenced by the recent Stadia threads.

One of the early users they mention is the Finnish VR hardware company Varjo -
imagine being able to have a monster GPU on the server doing all the hard
work, and having a lightweight non-tethered headset

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karthikvellanki
For compute intensive applications, doesn't compute time far exceed the
network latency?

If compute time is what makes up the bulk of the response time, moving the
server to the edge won't really reduce the response time significantly.

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daxfohl
Consider drone autopilot. Probably too heavy to run AI onboard. But latency
needs probably single digit ms. So pop in a 5G card and this would solve that
problem. (Though what to do when connection blacks out is a completely
different problem).

