Preface

Edge computing as we know it has rapidly evolved from its early days as a successor to the Internet of Things (IoT). Processing data at the source has become the ultimate goal because businesses and people expect analytics insights to be available and transaction results to be cleared in real time. That includes medical analysis, money transfers, payment receipts, video inferencing, and voice recognition. All this is possible because devices have become “smart” and the communication networks are able to deliver high speed and high throughput with low latencies to these new deployments. We have seen the rise of a new paradigm of application architecture specifically designed to run in domains that are not only constrained but also widely distributed. The IT architectures facilitating these advancements are unique because of the very nature of edge computing.

If the name of the game is to get insights quickly from all the data, we have to ensure there are applications able to do that, devices that can host the applications, and a network facilitating the information flow. That is the challenge solution architects face, which is who this book is primarily written for.

Drawing from real-world deployments in large enterprises and standards proposed by edge computing community organizations, this book emphasizes practical and tested-at-scale patterns and best practices used by leading companies worldwide. The book takes the reader from edge computing terminology and concepts to simple architectures, and eventually through end-to-end industry-specific approaches. It gives several points of view and rules of thumb and provides resources and recommendations for deeper thinking and research.