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All major cloud providers such as Google, AWS, Azure have one thing in common, each one of them is an extension of their public cloud offering to an enterprise on-premises location or edge. The end goal of public cloud services is to combine compute and storage into an enterprise level data center which is referred to as enterprise edge. The edge covers far edge devices over the public cloud along with network and enterprise edge.
In today’s topic we will learn about IBM edge computing, IBM cloud support for edge cloud initiatives and IBM case studies on edge deployment across industries.
What is IBM Edge Computing?
Edge computing is all about placement of computer workloads both hardware and software as close in proximity to the edge – where the data is created and actions are happening. IBM cloud edge computing delivers capabilities which enable businesses to process data close to the source reducing latency and bring in performance improvements. This is crucial for time sensitive applications which perform real time analytics such as industrial IoT and autonomous vehicles.
The figure below depicts how there are different types of edges and IBM cloud components are placed in an enterprise.
Edge comprises three components: a central hub which manages edge services deployment and orchestration, containerized applications or services which run on edge devices and edge nodes where applications run and data is getting generated.
IBM Cloud Support for Edge Computing
IBM cloud Satellite solution extends IBM cloud control plane to hardware running in enterprise data centers. It extends the IBM cloud control plane across locations. Locations are placed outside IBM cloud from where applications and services run. Each location is populated with nodes/ hosts which run applications and services. Hosts/ nodes are Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines from the data center or the edge. A location connects to IBM cloud using a link. The IBM cloud satellite architecture is depicted below.
Satellite link is OSI layer model (4-6) proxy with security features in addition. It does not operate at layer 3 or need layer 3 solutions but supports customer existing infrastructure solutions running at layer 3.
This has some core components which are common to Platform as a service (PaaS) as under:
- Satellite hosts / nodes are hypervisor agnostic Red Hat
- Cloud control plane is part of IBM cloud
- Secure tunnel link which is automatically installed on control plane along with its other components
- Satellite location control plane is minimum three satellite locations for orchestration of location services
Edge Computing: Use Cases Across Various Industries
- Autonomous vehicles – Self-driving cars and trucks using edge computing can help car navigation systems gather and interpret unending streams of data from various sensor inputs such as radar, LiDAR and traffic cameras). Since traffic situations change abruptly the navigation system should be capable of acting on this data in real time.
- Entertainment industry is given a new spin with edge computing by helping performers and their talents to reach a broader audience. This is done by caching web pages, music, and streaming video content on edge by reducing latency levels while consumers are streaming the content.
- Healthcare industry is the most critical user of edge computing where speed of information means difference between life and death. Edge computing reduces latency so that key patient data can be instantly routed to healthcare professionals to perform real time analysis on health information.
- Manufacturing efforts are supported by tiny machine learning which provides predictive maintenance by finding anomalies in manufacturing.
- Retail is getting competitive while using edge computing. They are provided several ways to set up user experiences which are unforgettable. In retail this technology can be used for computing restocking efforts, facial recognition with consumers, product recommendations etc.
- Security is enhanced with the usage of edge computing. It starts at the front gate by stopping malware to enter. It provides enhanced fraud detection capabilities to fintech companies