Edge Persistence: living in the edge
You haven’t heard of “edge persistence” and want to know about it , or want to know how it is related to HarperDB.
Combining edge computing with the cloud creates unique resiliency, bringing benefits to improve performance and latency.
Edge computing brings compute and data storage closer to where you need it. It improves performance and reduces latency when running your application or technology.
Persistence: allows a quality to persist over time, perhaps we need a service to be closer to the customer, to improve its accessibility. Your services can live at the edge/near your customers !
So edge persistence allows companies to globally distribute their applications, software and technologies closer to the end user’s location, improving performance and reducing latency. Latency : “is an expression of the time it takes for a data packet to travel from one designated point to another.” It does so continuously over long periods of time.”
We need to consume resources as services being as near as possible
We could start by talking about edge computing .
Edge computing was born in the early 1990s, when the volume of video and image downloads starts to increase along with the need for shorter download times.
Akamai, a company that decided to create content delivery networks, was born. This factor drove — along with others — the birth of what we know as edge computing.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a highly distributed server platform that helps minimize delays in loading web page content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user.
Edge Computing takes the idea of CDN one step further and generalizes it. This is because the CDN was created to bring content closer to the end user and, as we mentioned earlier, edge computing brings all the data, apps and technology closer to the end user.
Later, in 2001, came distributed and peer-to-peer apps, which made them more scalable and decentralized.
From those early days until now there have been a lot of technical improvement and nowadays we already have a mix of technologies that enforce the fact to bring services to consumers as they were directly plug in into the service source.
Be near feels good
The need for faster applications, faster data analytics, faster content delivery and greater scalability has pushed enterprises to find ways to decrease application latency. This need for hyper-fast applications that move at the speed of the Internet has exploded in recent years and will be growing on.
Ending the 2020 decade, edge persistence came into play even more strongly as we begin to see the rise of IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the evolution of “smart” everything in our lives.
Not only do we need reduced latency, we need it all the time. That means all day and all night. Gone are the days when we connected to our computers for a couple of hours or only used our computers for work.
So, do you need Edge Persistence ?
We can describe industries that need to have a globally distributed edge persistence when running their technology or application.
I make an interpretation from reading this link industries that need a high-performing low latency database by Margo McCabe.
1.Gaming & Media- Sure you have played a game and a lag has made you lose your concentration. You would be playing with someone on the other side of the world.
There is a possibility that even though you are here and they are, for example, in Singapore, the data from both of you will flow into a single centralized data center for the whole world and certainly far away from most of the users. What if the data and processes were hosted in centers located close to the users’ consumption?
Edge persistence can solve this by globally distributing the database used by a gaming company to data centers closer to the end user.
2. Industrial- There are massive amounts of data flowing through warehouses, production lines and delivery trucks, and also globally. There can be many sensors providing information to change decision levels to produce immediate adjustments.
There is a need to lower the levels of uncertainty in the logistics management of materials and services .
3. Energy (Utilities, Oil & Gas, Mining) when working in the energy sector, people rely on these companies to keep the lights on. Data is important for planning. Latency can cause catastrophic errors affecting millions of people. The ability to make quick decisions and execute them in real time is crucial.
4. Retail- Online shopping dominates the retail space and customers are demanding. A bad user experience is as simple as a user having to wait more than a second for a company’s web page to load while shopping. That’s how simple it is to turn away a large number of customers.
Why Global Edge Persistence Will Change the World
You now know where the need for edge persistence comes from, and you have a brief overview of the evolution of edge computing towards edge persistence. You also have some ideas about what industries and use cases would benefit.
A claim was made that may make you nervous: edge persistence at the edge will change the world, ok, let’s see my arguments.
The world is constantly moving at a faster pace and so will all the applications or software we use. The software available today in the cloud is still a far away from complexities that software installed on PC can reach.
As data becomes more interrelated/intricate to our daily operations and more services need to be consumed to take decisions, we will need those knowledge and decisions at faster speeds.
There are also use cases, for which low responsiveness, poor performance, is not an option and drives into severely negative consequences. Even many aspects that we have become familiar with until now will not be intolerable in the near future.
Production lines will be able to make smarter decisions-more data is taken and processed from different sources in real time-, reducing costs and delivering the products/services even faster.
Maybe you are thinking about the environmental changes and the risks that pollution puts into the future, maybe you are thinking about the management of the present pandemic or future ones. Don’t you think it would help us to have a greater quantity and quality of data to be accessed in real time?
HarperDb on the edge
At HarperDB, they are at the forefront of persistence technology at the edge. Your company can create a unified data fabric across the globe with HarperDB distributed across a multitude of data centers, regardless of vendor. A cloud-independent database offers the opportunity to choose the right data center location anywhere, rather than deciding between limited centralized locations, as some competitors do.
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