Alan, Principle Technologist at Macrometa, talks about why he joined and the future of Edge Cloud

A conversation with Redmonk Analyst Kelly Fitzpatrick

In the past, I've viewed edge computing as a new kind of tier to cloud computing and one that potentially eclipses the centralized clouds - because it's a natural place to run anything that is interactive, needs to analyze large volumes of shared state data and quickly compute against short time value data. Seen from Josh's perspective it almost seems inevitable to me that edge computing will eclipse cloud computing and that new companies will not just challenge but dethrone the big cloud incumbents.

Content Delivery Networks or CDNs have received a lot of attention in the last few years, with the emergence of newer and richer feature capabilities and features. Companies like Fastly and CloudFlare have entered the market with a focus on helping developers leverage the power of edge computing and hyper-locality to users by caching static content close to where it is being used.

The cloud is going through a great tectonic shift. Put simply, we're now entering a new phase of the cloud where the main assumptions underlying its architecture inhibit it from solving emerging problems with data processing. The biggest shift in how we create data and use it is happening hidden in plain sight. The shift is from seeing and using data like its a historical record (seeing the world in the past tense), to seeing and using data as a dynamic set of events happening continuously in the now (seeing the world in the present tense instead of past tense) anywhere in the world.

Contributed by EDGE GRAVITY from their new blog series: Edge Computing Thought Leadership. This collection of blogs will focus on new technologies and industry leaders in the edge computing market as way to educate a broad IT audience in the future capabilities at the edge.

Life happens in the HERE and in the NOW. The HERE and the NOW are defined by where we are and what interactions, events are going on around us and with us. These events and interactions occur in the real world and not some far off data center a thousand miles from us.

OK, I admit. This is a controversial statement. After that admission, I can honestly say that as a user, cloud computing doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference where my apps live. Now, to the fun part