The most incredible, and still under-appreciated, aspect of cloud platforms is that together they collect an astounding variety of variously performing systems into a collective cluster that can share processing power and storage. An enterprise data center, logically speaking, has become almost by definition a cloud unto itself.
So is the edge, in this construct, a component of this cloud or an appendage of it?
It’s not a trivial question. It has everything to do with how your enterprise’s edge devices are physically serviced and administered. Yes, edge assets and edge data centers are designed to be centrally managed from a remote location, but if edge processors will be running tasks that are exclusive to edge computing anyway, then is a single management console in one location such a good idea?
The Edge as a Connected Cloud
One set of answers to these questions comes from a company that, just a few short years ago, would have seemed an unlikely candidate for inclusion in any discussion of edge computing: cloud file storage provider Ctera.
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