Edge computing
Edge computing provides application processing load balancing capacity to web servers.
Fragments of the applications are replicated accross a vast distributed network of web servers. This type of technology is not completely new. Many large organisations have had to delploy Web Farms with clustering to ensure acceptable performance.
Edge computing now makes this technology available to all businesses small, medium and large.
The technology does however impose certain limitations to the choice of technology platform and even to the implementations in that the applications need to be specifically developed for edge computing.
Edge computing and Grid computing as nephews. Whereas Grid computing would be hardcoded into a specific application to distribute its complex and resource intensive computational needs accross a global grid of cheap networked machines, Edge computing provides a generic template facility for any type of application to spread its execution accross a dedicated grid of prepared expensive machines.
Grid computing is more socialistic, bargaining of the welfare of the common Internet user. The user is generally a research initiative wanting to solve complex problems such as finding aliens and unfolding protiens. Edge computing is based on a charged for network services model. The end user is any Internet user making use of a commercial Internet service. The customer for edge servers is the organisations wanting to linearly scale there business application performance to the growth of is subscriber base.
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