While growing in the shadow of cloud, Edge is rising as a new Edgedorado.

Over the past 2 years, we’ve seen a myriad of blog posts, articles and conversations that talk about that new golden path to a profitable future.

Still, this is uncharted territory, and nobody seems to question either the quest or how well equipped they are to undertake the journey... So, my question is: “will the search for Edgedorado be another fruitless trek such as the one that led many to their death in the rainforests and mountains of South America”?

We’ll start mapping a path forward in the coming weeks, but first let’s explore why so many want to go on this trek in the first place. Just what is so exciting about the promise of Edge?

1. Edge is supposed to be big money. The analyst firms have a bunch of estimates for the global edge computing market size but seem to converge around USD 150 billion by 2030 with CAGR of around 25% to 30%.

2. From a value standpoint, there are a lot of people getting behind the idea that Edge could be the only way to address transformative use cases that cut across industry boundaries and leverage 5G (6G in the future) to secure, accelerate and improve everything that impacts people and things.

Frankly, who could, or would want to, resist such a dream? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s not worth the ride and that Edgedorado does not exist. I just believe it is worth making the effort to do a little technical and architectural digging to equip ourselves with the tools we need to get there and plan the route to success before hitting the road.

Edge is far from being new, so why does Edge as a new computing paradigm make sense now?

While it’s true that embedded systems, compute in remote offices and factory systems have been around for decades, the convergence of infrastructure development, application constraints and new levels of connectedness is something that makes Edge the next big thing. The points where all these things come together can be seen in the image below:

In all these cases, multiple applications are under severe service level constraints with significant infrastructure requirements such as:

• Being capable of making predictive real-time decisions?
• Dealing with millions of events
• Ensuring continuous operation and keep performing whether connected to a WAN or not

From a physical infrastructure perspective, it means ubiquitous compute resource, always available and topologically close to where it’s needed. But there is more.

Edge Dorado fantasy or reality?

There is really no fundamental question about the need for Edge. Use cases are everywhere, but fulfillment of the conditions to make Edge practical at scale are still more myth than reality. To get from a treasure map to a real map means we need to go beyond use case and physical infrastructure constraints.

Even if you have infrastructure everywhere – which is already a challenge - you need the ubiquitous connectivity that goes with it and the reliability and availability that 5G brings to the party. Even then, you will still get stuck if you don’t have some type of application platform that will take care of all the rest of the plumbing essential to test, deploy and maintain any application or use case. Today, the market calls this MEC or Multi-Access Edge Computing, and it is the essential equipment we need to reach the promise land.

We’ll discuss this new beast in the next episode.