Cloud Hosting

In many situations, using cloud computing and edge computing at the same time can lead to the best overall outcome from a performance perspective.

Discussions about the relationship between cloud computing and edge computing have a tendency to present the cloud and edge as opposite types of architectures and to treat them as an either/or proposition.

This isnt the best way to think about cloudand edge. Although there are key differences between cloud and edge computing,the cloud and the edge dont compete with each other as much as they complementeach other.

The differences between cloud computing andedge computing boil down largely to where workloads are hosted.

In a conventional cloud, data and applicationsare housed in large data centers located within a public cloud vendorsnetwork.

In an edge architecture, workloads are hostedin a location that is closer from the perspective of the network toend-users than is a traditional data center.

Its worth noting that the definition of edgecan get a little messy because there are many possible ways to build an edgearchitecture. Sometimes, an edge environment runs directly on end-user devices.In others, it looks more like a traditional data center populated byconventional servers, which happen to be closer to end-users than traditionalcloud data centers.

Cloud computing tends to be morestraightforward from an architectural perspective. Although there can be somevariation in which cloud regions and zones teams use to host workloads, allpublic cloud environments rely on conventional data centers that arecomparatively distant again, in networking terms from end-users.

Although cloud and edge computing arefundamentally different types of architectures, cloud vs. edge is notnecessarily the best way to think about them.

In many cases, it makes sense to use bothcloud and edge at the same time. Cloud data centers can host workloads thatdont require the minimal latency and high reliability of those hosted on theedge, while edge infrastructure handles those that do.

By pairing cloud and edge together, organizations can leverage the scalability and ease of deployment of cloud environments while still achieving high-performance goals that cloud data centers cant always support due to network latency issues.

This isnt to say that you always have to usecloud and edge at the same time. Its entirely possible to host applications ordata in the cloud without also running an edge environment. Its also possible although less common to use edge without using a public cloud.

But in general, using cloud computing and edge computing at the same time can lead to the best overall outcome from a performance perspective. The only big downside is that it can be harder to manage a cloud environment and an edge environment at the same time, although platforms like Kubernetes simplify this by making it easy to deploy applications to both types of environments from a central management plane.

Link:
How Cloud Computing and Edge Computing Fit Together - RTInsights