Edge Computing Explained: What It Is, How It Differs From the Cloud, and When You Need It

Light is fast, but not infinitely fast. In optical fibre it travels at roughly 200,000 kilometres per second, about two-thirds of its speed in a vacuum. That works out to one millisecond for every 200 kilometres, one way. Send a request from Halifax to a cloud data centre in Montreal and back, and physics alone costs you about eight milliseconds before a single server does any work. Route it through real-world networks, with their detours and switching equipment, and the number climbs. Shrinking that trip is the whole premise of edge computing. For most of what you do online, that…