The edge is not the cloud - a new leader must emerge

Julio Franco

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Staff member

Development of the edge is fundamentally different than the birth and growth of the cloud. As a result, it’s causing a dramatic revolution. And this revolution is necessary.

To meet the needs of an evolving media industry, which is making traditional media obsolete, a massive shift not only in the amount of infrastructure that is required, but also the way the infrastructure is architected, will emerge. New models for video on demand (VOD), over the top (OTT), and content streaming are creating a tremendous strain on existing infrastructure and the problem is compounding rapidly. By 2020, one million minutes of online video will be consumed every second, which represents a larger number of people watching online video than TV. Recognizing that to be successful online video requires speed, capacity, and quality; media and entertainment companies have increased their investment in technology. If their content isn’t delivered with the highest quality, to every customer, every time; their competitors will deliver video experiences that are.

The current cloud model puts video workloads primarily in mega data centers. These buildings typically live on the outskirts of populated areas. That was good enough, but now it doesn’t cut it. Enter the edge. Being strategically located in the overall topology of the cloud, the edge is uniquely positioned to offer optimized workloads. Computing, storage, and delivery responsibilities in origin data centers are shared with computing, storage, and delivery resources in points of presence that are closer to the eyeballs. The decentralizing of processing leads to three key wins: better data aggregation and consolidation, reduced latency, and increased security. Real-world business value can be measured by faster data analysis, lower network traffic costs, optimized cloud and on-premise costs, better quality of service, and improved regulatory compliance. As GDPR reaches its full impact on companies worldwide, the impact this edge workflow has on personal privacy is important to call out.

Today media companies are testing the edge and moving some pieces of their workflow out of the mega data center, but we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. We haven’t seen a complete platform that offers a robust solution at the edge, close to the end users, that offers up the full potential the edge offers. A platform that is secure, provides composable infrastructure services, and can quickly and easily accommodate an increased demand, so they can leverage edge services and even create and deliver edge services of their own. There are distinct reasons why the incumbents haven’t delivered this platform and most likely won’t.

The public cloud services providers own the cloud today, but they aren’t agnostic. Meaning, with a closed ecosystem, customers can’t securely and seamlessly integrated multiple services from multiple suppliers. Some are looking to the CDN service providers to grow their edge capabilities. The blocker here is a CAPEX issue. They’ve invested millions, for years, in an architecture that doesn’t scale like a true cloud architecture. Besides, they weren’t built to allow third parties to build on their infrastructure. Finally, the legacy security providers may want to get into the edge business, but they deploy their services on others’ clouds and edge infrastructures. They lack the expertise, scale, and scope to build their own platforms.

This is why StackPath was founded in 2015. StackPath created a platform of secure edge services that enables developers to protect, accelerate, and innovate cloud properties ranging from websites to media delivery and IoT services. The platform is origin agnostic, able to hyperscale, inherently secure, and allows users to easily connect to a fully secure SaaS world. Integrated and automated through a single API and customer portal, the platform allows any company to build and deploy their own solutions at the edge.

This is a sponsored post brought to you in collaboration with StackPath.

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"The Edge" is all about Distributed Processing: Portions of the workload are performed by different, and in this case, geologically dispersed sites. The CDN is similar but less comprehensive.

Both concepts offload mundane work from the core server(s) to improve responsiveness. The caveat however, is any reduced bandwidth or outage induces major function issues for the web service. From time to time, even here on TS, there have been networking issues such that the CSS files don't load and massively impact the presentation until the issue is resolved.

bottom line is: There's no free lunch.
 
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