CloudEXPO 2019

The Edge Needs a New Data Architecture

Bold predictions are being made about the disruptive new applications that edge computing will unleash on enterprises and consumers. However, edge computing unlike cloud computing. is a distributed data problem. Creating enterprise grade systems that can deliver geo distributed database capabilities with useful consistency guarantees is extremely challenging and conventional approaches fail at doing these at global scales.For edge computing to become a reality, we need geo-distributed databases that can scale across hundreds of locations worldwide yet act in concert to provide a single coherent multi master database. This in turn requires us to design a system that works on the internet with its unpredictable network topology, use some form of time keeping that is not lossy, and avoid centralized forms of consensus yet still arrive at some shared version of truth in real time.

In this presentation I discuss the needs and design of such a serverless edge platform for stateful, data intensive, realtime applications and web services that need to run in a distributed manner, at the edge, closer to humans (end users), their things (devices) than the cloud can.