Marrying Edge Computing with Serverless in 5G
During the 2nd half of 2019, we attended several public cloud conferences such as Alicloud Apsara (Sep/19), Microsoft Ingite (Nov/19) and AWS Re:Invent (Dec/19). We observed an emerging trend of large public cloud providers partnering with 5G telecom providers on edging computing. Cloud providers are also increasingly applying serverless computing on the edge to get the fastest execution and lowest latency.
Edge Computing
Edge computing is not a new concept. It is a distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to locations near end users, thus can improve response time and save bandwidth. However, traditional edge locations have to serve many different types of computing OS, which reduces its performance.
During the last decade, with the rise of public clouds, many edge locations began to serve a homogenous cloudOS, such as AWS, Azure or OpenStack. By pushing abstract layers of machine learning models and lightweight databases to the edge infrastructure, the latency involved in making a round trip to the cloud is minimized. As a result, cloud developers can dramatically improve the end-user experience. The so-called 'cloud edge computing' is now widely adopted technology infrastructure.
However, as 5G gradually builds up and data generation explodes, there are several drawbacks of 'cloud edge computing'. One is the limited computing resources in edge locations. Another is the heavy lifting for developers to configure VM/containers at each location. The growing popularity of serverless computing helps solve these problems.
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Serverless Computing
Also known as Function as a service (FaaS), which is a cloud-native computing architecture that allows developers to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. It eliminates infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning.
Pioneered by AWS in 2014, serverless computing gradually gained popularity among tech start-ups and enterprises. All major cloud providers such as AWS and Azure are investing heavily in this space. During AWS Re:Invent this year, AWS rolled out serverless Kubernetes that receive tremendous interest from developers.
Benefits of deploying serverless at the edge. For serverless edge computing, the benefits are list as follows. For a more in-depth presentation, readers can check this out.
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Public cloud edge/serverless solutions. We summarized the offerings from both AWS and Azure in the table below. In addition to these public cloud solutions, there are many other serverless edge computing solutions, such as Akamai Edgeworkers, Cloudflare Workers, EdgeX Foundry, and etc.
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