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Innovating at the Edge for a Competitive Advantage

By Brent Schroeder, Global CTO, SUSE

Enterprise adoption of edge computing is still in its infancy. Even with 15 billion edge devices deployed in field (IBM 2022) and strong appetite across sectors, today's Edge landscape is nothing compared to the future scale of the market. We are on the cusp of tremendous growth as hardware improvements, ever more accessible connectivity, and the influence of cloud-native approaches promise to unlock innovation. The latest research suggests that worldwide spending on edge will eclipse last year's $208 billion to reach $317 billion by 2026.

There is good reason for this: innovators in every industry are discovering new use cases and building a competitive advantage with next gen edge computing. Forward-looking transformation strategies are moving closer to the point of interaction where real-time analysis of data is utilized to drive new revenue and efficiency opportunities. This will have profound implications for the success and competitiveness of enterprises. Recent Accenture research found that 83% of C-suite executives saw edge computing as essential to remaining competitive. And time is running out: 81% believed that a failure to act quickly will lock them out from the full benefits of edge. (Accenture: Leading with edge computing, 2023)

Defining a Complex Landscape

While such recognition of edge's growing significance to enterprises is encouraging, it remains a nebulous and poorly understood term.  At SUSE, we find it helpful to break edge down into three distinct but overlapping areas: near, far, and tiny.

The near edge is largely the realm of telecommunications and closest to the data center with communications providers bringing computing resources close to their own infrastructure. Beyond, we find the far edge, where deployments may stretch into tens of thousands and we see the most diverse use cases across commercial and industrial sectors. Examples include satellites, cell towers, and retail points of service (POS). Finally, the tiny edge is closely tied to the Industrial Internet of Things where small, fixed-function, and lightly resourced devices are deployed at scale such as security cameras, environmental sensors, and factory floor controllers.

Unlocking Opportunities with a Cloud-Native Approach

Modern edge deployments share some fundamental building blocks: geographic distribution, decentralized architecture, often a need for low-latency processing - and scale. Customers typically have 1,000's and can scale into the 10,000's of locations under management. These characteristics present challenges not found in traditional on prem and cloud models and enterprises grapple with the reality of managing the complexity of applications across a myriad of devices, using resource-constrained hardware, and the need for high levels of observability and control. Yet these characteristics also underpin the opportunities offered by edge when applications are much closer to the point of interaction and able to unlock instant insight through real-time data analysis.

For innovators looking to realize the competitive advantage offered by edge, the key to success lies in intelligent deployment, scaling and securing of infrastructure across thousands of sites. To do this, we need to leverage technologies and processes originally born in the cloud to tackle the challenges presented by this complex ecosystem. A modern cloud-native stack can deliver reliable, scalable edge solutions and full lifecycle management built on three pillars: containers, Kubernetes to orchestrate those, and automation running across the ecosystem.

At the edge, innovators typically need to optimize both the agility and footprint of applications. Businesses want to deliver new value fast and often. In contrast to monolithic applications, containers pair exceptionally well with continuous delivery models, enabling teams to rapidly deliver capabilities as well as incrementally add value in rapid succession. Additionally, the smaller footprint of containers and the ability to break down applications into more granular services better suits software delivery to small endpoints over low bandwidth networks often found in remote edge environments.

Once built, orchestrating and lifecycling containerized applications across a large distributed environment is far beyond the capabilities of manual processes. Kubernetes has definitively won the container orchestration war. Across edge solution deployments, little is static - locations come and go, deployments may grow, and updates to applications and infrastructure happen at a rapid pace. A framework is needed to automate and orchestrate this dynamic ecosystem without the need to continually rescript control planes in languages designed in an era of static infrastructure and monolithic applications. Implementing Kubernetes at the edge is typically facilitated by purpose-built and lightweight operating system and Kubernetes distributions to address limited hardware resources, remote locations and offline operation (or weak connectivity). The most widely adopted of these is K3s, which Rancher built and donated to the CNCF.  Lastly, amid the wider attack surface inherent to edge computing, security solutions that cover the full container lifecycle are crucial: from secure software supply chains, to detecting and remediating known and new security issues swiftly and at scale, to zero trust solutions that protect against (yet) unknown issues.

Gaining Competitive Advantage at the Edge

With the right stack and tools in place, innovators are then able to unlock the potential of edge computing and revolutionize operations. The tiny edge is receiving a lot of attention amid the transition to Industry 4.0 and serves as a useful illustration.

Compare the everyday experience of a manufacturer that has embraced edge and one that remains tied to legacy infrastructure. One brings its devices and sensors at a location into a cloud-native ecosystem, gaining real-time, granular visibility and the ability to locally process millions of data points in seconds. It sees reduced costs, improved efficiency, lower downtime, better resource allocation, and less energy consumption. The other does not understand its environment as thoroughly, lacks comprehensive real-time data collection, and risks losing share in an industry where resilience and cost-control are critical.

As another example telecommunications providers are leveraging edge to deliver open and flexible communications infrastructure that is future-proofed and highly scalable. SUSE's Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP) is optimized for this category, enabling rapid rollouts (and updates) of 5G networks and simplification of operations at scale. This is crucial as we look to how next generation networks will support the new use cases expected to arise from 5G and wider adoption of multi-access edge computing.

From a global perspective Edge computing may be in its early stages - still it is already having a profound impact across various sectors. Adoption is skyrocketing and it's no surprise that Gartner predicts that by 2025 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created outside of the traditional data center or cloud (CNCF 2022).

It is exciting to see early innovators already leveraging edge technologies to unlock new use cases and business models. Are they looking too far into the future? We don't think so.  We believe edge is crucial and those that are planning for it are gaining a competitive advantage over those failing to evolve.

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Join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America this November 6 - 9 in Chicago for more on Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brent Schroeder, Global CTO, SUSE

Brent Schroeder 

As Global SUSE CTO, Mr. Schroeder is responsible for shaping SUSE's technology and portfolio strategy in support of emerging use cases in areas such as Hybrid Cloud, IoT and AI/ML. He drives the technology relationship with numerous industry partners, participates in open source communities as well as evangelizes the SUSE vision with customers, press and analysts.

Mr. Schroeder brings to SUSE 30 years of technology innovation and development experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining SUSE, with Dell's Office of the CTO, he was responsible for software technology strategy covering hybrid cloud, systems management, virtualization and operating systems. Mr. Schroeder has also held various management and engineering roles with NCR, Compaq and HP.

Mr. Schroeder holds Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration from Iowa State University.

Published Wednesday, October 11, 2023 7:32 AM by David Marshall
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