Chicken or Egg! At the centre of discussions at last week’s Edge Congress in London was the question of what needed to come first in making the CSP business case for edge cloud: Compelling edge applications or available edge infrastructure. The presentations largely focused on compelling applications for edge cloud, but in an interesting ad-hoc panel session the majority of panel members said that edge infrastructure was key to driving demand. Chicken! Appledore believe that the underlying business case for deploying edge cloud will fundamentally be based on infrastructure economics. Edge Cloud needs to address the same basic infrastructure issues as public cloud: Maximize multi-tenancy Minimize power and environment infrastructure and running cost Maximize automation and minimise operational cost. Achieving this cannot rely on one or two “killer applications”. In fact a reliance on one or two applications is highly likely to drive the edge cloud to specifically support these applications. At the same time, without a compelling base application, it is unlikely that CSPs or anyone will invest in edge infrastructure. Chicken and Egg! Squaring this circle the CSPs can learn from the public cloud players. AWS infrastructure was not created based on speculative new applications; rather it was the […]