
Edge computing could push the cloud to the fringe - tzury
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/edge-computing-could-push-the-cloud-to-the-fringe/
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jackfraser
First of all, this guy seems like he watched the last season of Silicon Valley
and took it too seriously (perhaps due to having his firm name-dropped, who
knows).

> As Levine puts it, “Think about a self-driving car, it’s effectively a data
> center on wheels, and a drone is a data center with wings and a robot is a
> data center with arms and legs and a [ship] is a floating data center…”

A self-driving car is not a datacentre. It will have a few computers, sure,
but a datacentre is a distinct class of entity featuring hundreds of highly-
available, enterprise grade computers; the self-driving cars that will
ultimately succeed will have automotive grade machines, built to the lowest
possible standard and price that meets quality and reliability requirements as
defined by the DoT and the warranty department.

A drone is not a datacentre with wings. It has the least it can possibly have
aboard, because it needs to use as little electricity as possible for
computing so that most of it can be used for spinning motors. While some
drones do have multicore CPUs and GPUs on board, if anything we'll likely see
improvements in wireless that enable that kind of tech to be pushed back to
base stations / controllers / phones, so as to free up more precious battery
for flying.

Now, a ship I'll believe - you do need racks of servers on a cruise ship, for
sure, especially given the fact that it's going to be away from a reliable
network connection for ages at a time. However, it's not doing the same thing
as the cloud; it's got to be reliable as hell with minimal IT staff on hand to
deal with it, which means imaged machines running simple, basic things that
can be trusted without having to have techs use expensive satellite data to
fix it remotely.

While there's some logic to the circular nature of centralized vs. distributed
communication, packaging this up and branding it as "edge computing" strikes
me less as a true observation or prediction, and more as someone who's spent
too much time thinking about things through a marketing lens.

