Challenges and Solutions in Edge Computing Technology

Edge computing technology is undoubtedly top-notch, but it comes with its challenges. With edge computing, there are some built-in limitations that exist for good reasons. For instance, many providers complicatedly restrict access to a subset of network and outbound HTTP calls.

This is to avoid detracting from the offering of the performance that edge provides. While you can get to deploy your code in hundreds of data centers worldwide with edge computing, if you need to make an API call, you are going to be taking those hundreds of data centers and piping them down into one or two from an API endpoint perspective. This can negate most of the cost savings and the latency improvements that you get with edge computing.

This restriction of access is practiced by most, for good reasons, yet most applications need this. We need that network to make external fetch calls to a database or an API. There are however some promising approaches that can solve this. Also remember, many with edge computing, many providers limit the execution time.

If you're starting to run into a 10 second plus runtime, you might be better off in a serverless type experience because now there's no real need for edge computing since the user is already waiting that long. There are edge providers that do offer the ability to make outbound network calls, but depending on your application, if you need to make a lot of outbound network calls probably to a distant database, this will increase the latency which you would get with edge computing. An excellent solution is to bring all that data to every single edge.

For instance, a provider like PubNub gives you the option to bring your data to the edge, granting you sub millisecond access to your data. This alone is one of the most challenging aspects of edge in general because most of our API systems need access to data. Another challenge with edge computing is that there are fewer languages environment supported.

You'll often see things like Javascript, WASM, Rust, Python and Lua, and it usually stops there. The idea is a small footprint that is really fast and that requires extra effort from the vendor to provide the platform. Because of the power of the edge, a lot of planning in your architecture needs to be more thoroughly examined.

Most businesses have a central database of users and other collections of data, typically utilizing something like a PostgreSQL or MySQL database. The edge provider will need to give you a way to bring that data into the edge location for direct access.

[Artefic]

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