1. Deficiencies of Cloud Computing

Big data transmission: It is estimated that by 2020, each person will produce an average of 1.5GB of data per day. As more and more devices connect to the Internet and generate data, cloud computing with central servers as nodes may encounter bandwidth bottlenecks.

Immediateness of data processing: According to statistics, driverless vehicles generate about 1 GB of data per second, Boeing 787 generates more than 5 GB per second; in 2020, China’s data storage reached about 39 ZB, of which about 30% of the data comes from Internet of Things equipment access. Immediate processing of massive data may make cloud computing powerless.

Privacy and Energy Consumption: Cloud computing transfers private data collected by wearable, medical, industrial and other devices to data centers for a relatively long path, which can easily lead to the risk of data loss or information leakage. High energy consumption caused by high load of data centers is also the core issue of data center management planning.

As mentioned above, with the advent of the era of interconnection of all things, cloud computing is increasingly unable to fully meet people’s growing demand for new technologies for a better life, and can not overcome real-time, bandwidth, security, privacy and other issues. In this context, edge computing is gradually emerging. With the rise of edge computing, huge amounts of data need to be computed in too many scenarios and get instant feedback.

2. Advantages and Development of Edge Computing

Edge computing has a broad development prospects, known as the “last kilometer of artificial intelligence”, but it is still in its early stage of development. There are many problems to be solved, such as: the selection of framework, the specification of communication equipment and protocol, the identification of terminal equipment, the need for lower latency, and so on. With the popularization of IPv6 and 5G technology, some of these problems will be solved, although this is a long process. Compared with cloud computing, edge computing has the following advantages.

Advantage 1: More nodes to load traffic, making data transmission faster.

Advantage 2: Closer to terminal devices, safer transmission and more immediate data processing.

Advantage 3: More decentralized nodes have less impact than cloud computing failures, and also solve the problem of heat dissipation of equipment.

As mentioned above, the disadvantages of cloud computing and the advantages of edge computing, does it mean that edge computing will be better than cloud computing in the future? Actually not! Cloud computing is the interaction between people and computing devices, while edge computing belongs to the interaction between devices and devices, and finally indirectly serves people. Edge computing can process large amounts of real-time data, and cloud computing can finally access the history or processing results of these real-time data and do summary analysis.

There is a vivid analogy. If cloud computing is the brain of octopus, then edge calculation is the antenna of octopus. The antenna’s response to external stimuli is mostly instinctive, and the results of these constant stimuli will eventually converge into the brain, which will provide the basis for decision-making for the subsequent behavior of the antenna. From this point of view, cloud computing and edge computing are a symbiotic and complementary relationship, and there will be no question of who will replace whom, but who will be more advantageous in which computing and who will be more suitable in which scenarios. Edge computing needs to work with cloud computing to maximize the value of each other.