Industrial Automation Magazine India

Fog computing is all about running small analytics at the edge

Published on : Monday 08-11-2021

Pradyumna Narayan, Senior Consultant – Edge Consultant.

While Cloud computing is popular, what explains the rising popularity of edge computing?
Communicating the data to the cloud and bringing it to and fro to the edge device, makes the system “near” real time.
 
There is a cost attached to cloud based storage, analytics and device onboarding solutions, wherein edge computing only connects back to cloud for billing requirements, so it can be said Edge is a one-time capital investment, for running various cost effective edge solutions.
 
What are the unique advantages of Edge Computing vis-à-vis cloud models? Is cloud computing a status symbol?
Edge computing is all about running models and algorithms at the ‘edge’ i.e., near the machines, which increases the decision taking capability of the system.
 
Many industries still rely more on ‘in-house’ or ‘on-prim’ solutions, in such cases edge computing works as a gateway to Industry 4.0 with taking care of privacy issues or customer’s priorities.
 
Cloud rather than just being a status symbol becomes a must in the present day scenario, it helps organisations to abide the industry 4.0 solutions with other corporate networks. It also helps managing hierarchy and alert matrix, i.e., organisations can have a single point stop for needs of engineers, managers and the CEO.
 
Does using cloud models of business eventually play into the hands of the giant corporations? How can companies protect against this monopoly?
Nowadays many other players are coming in the market with cloud infrastructures but you will find that most of the Fortune 500 companies are kind of ‘shop’ for few cloud providers. Other reasons for monopoly can be seasoned, secured and compliant solutions provided by these cloud infra providers so that corporations find them easy integrations to the present IT infra.
 
There were other terms in play like fog, which should be between the edge and cloud. Are these technologies still relevant?
Fog computing is all about running small analytics at the edge. People in industry use Fog computing and Edge computing interchangeably as both means bringing analytics closer to edge. Cloud is meant to run bigger analytics models for a longer term, fog in turn means running small models. Many edges can use a single fog computing model.
 
How would the rollout of 5G change the equations for Cloud?
5G interestingly is not only meant for the internet of humans, it is a great boost to ‘Massive internet of things as well’. The telemetry from small devices would travel in guard bands to cloud or other servers. Any small device such as car keys, spoons, mouse and aquarium water temperature would be easily accessible that too in an isolated manner. Massive IoT does not target on running machine learning, AI models on edge, rather it targets at setting up massive amounts of small telemetry devices that can pump the data to cloud, which is going to increase the need of cloud computing, cloud engineers several times. Cloud has a brighter future ahead.
 
Pradyumna Narayan Tiwari is an IoT professional with experience in a range of edge IoT gateways, IoT platforms. He has worked on IoT product development and digital transformation initiatives.