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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

I wonder which definition of "Edge" is going to win out because right now it's being used interchangeably to mean either: 1) CDN or 2) On-premise machines/IoT.

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Are these really two competing definitions or just manifestations of the same concept? What is considered an edge device depends on the boundaries of whatever network is under discussion.

I've never heard it used with that second definition. It's pretty consistently used to refer to running close to the user, as opposed to having a big data center which most of your users aren't near.

The second definition could be a confusion of ownership — i.e. are you paying a CDN to do higher-level service or running the services yourself?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing

Wikipedia's definition primarily focuses on the local/IoT version as a distinctly different from utilizing a CDN.

I wouldn't define a CDN as edge computing either, since computation is not the purpose of a CDN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network contains

> Most CDN providers will provide their services over a varying, defined, set of PoPs [...]. These sets of PoPs can be called "edges", "edge nodes" or "edge networks" as they would be the closest edge of CDN assets to the end user"

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_device which uses yet another idea of what The Edge is (in this case routers to a bigger network)

So "Edge" is the new "Cloud". Got it.

I work on an Edge Platform team as part of an Edge Foundation that manages both external CDN and internal Tier 1 WAF/Ingress systems. We do Edge computing at both CDN and Tier 1 layers via tenant plugins running LUA/go. We also have an SDN team building Tier 2 solutions, so basically systems operating at the edge of each layer of the HTTP stack.

And let me guess, the web admin dashboard only works in ... IE6? <smirk>

This article is about neither of those things, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_device is the term that's relevant to this article. It's about the network edge itself.

Those aren't completely distinct. We've started calling the edge everything between app servers and user devices. The boundary is "where your users are in control", but the edge itself is pretty fat.

It's the "edge" of what you control as the service provider.

It's OK, you can call your on-premises machine/IoT "Fog" computing - thank Cisco. :)

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