In recent years, there has been a strong push to move everything to a centralized cloud, enabled by virtualization and driven by the need to cut costs, reduce the time to market for new services, and increase flexibility. In recent years fog computing have discussed how location impacts performance, efficient use of network resources and subscriber experience. Physical distance inevitably increases latency. Therefore, the OpenFog Consortium was organized to develop a cross-industry approach to enabling end-to-end IoT deployments by creating a reference architecture to drive interoperability in connecting the edge and the cloud. The group has identified numerous IoT use cases that require edge computing including smart buildings, drone-based delivery services, real-time subsurface imaging, traffic congestion management and video surveillance. The group released a fog computing reference architecture in February 2017.
Now Microsoft is pursuing to push the Cloud to the edge
Microsoft has recently introduced IoT Edge and Azure Sphere, their first reference design that aims to combine the power of a new class of microcontroller (MCU) with built-in security, a purpose-built OS that is optimized for security and agility, and a cloud security service that guards the device. Azure Sphere is targeted towards the outer regions of the intelligent edge and is Microsoft’s push to serve the billions of MCU-powered devices that are built and deployed each year.
The Azure Sphere’s three areas are: a secure Microcontroller unit, that by design and production will have an in-built security layer (called Pluton); an OS running an embedded Linux Kernel; a service provided by Azure brokering trust for device-to-device and device-to-cloud communication.
The first general available chip has been launched and there is now also the first development kit available.
More information:
IoT Cloud Architect, martin.andersen@glaze.dk, +45 70 23 50 05.
Read more about Edge Computing here.