Living on the edge

With data- and AI-driven development taking over the world, it may easily seem that the cloud is the place where everything happens. This is where the data is stored and analyzed, where the machine- and deep-learning models run and where all the value resides. The perspective of people living in this world is that all the connected devices in the world only have the role of collecting data and uploading it to the cloud.

There is, however, a second development ongoing that’s easily missed: in an ‘internet of things’ world it’s what happens on the edge that’s the most interesting right now. Over the last weeks, I have been exposed and have talked to several companies that develop products that live on the edge of the network. These products are increasingly powerful from a computing and storage perspective.

Using heterogeneous hardware including GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs, these companies are able to develop extremely powerful solutions that, at the same time, are very efficient from an energy usage and physical space perspective. The solutions may lack some of the flexibility and scalability that cloud solutions provide, but at the same time, have major advantages in terms of security, reliable real-time behavior and context awareness.