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“When you think of a retailer with 2,000 locations across the country, it’s too expensive to deploy local data processing and analytics for each location, so edge computing can be a huge help there,” says Paul Savill, senior vice president of product management and services at Lumen Technology. has been designed to work with cloud computing on the edges. “Edge nodes combine hardware computing power and software-defined network capabilities to connect to the public cloud,” he explains. “Starting from a centralized node in a Denver-sized market area, edge computing can serve five more store locations in another millisecond.”
The opportunities outweigh the challenges
Shivkumar Krishnan, head of store engineering at Gap, said the main challenge in making edge computing a reality in retail is the heritage infrastructure. “As an end user of the cloud, it’s much easier to upgrade, all you have to do is press a button and turn off or replace the virtual machine. It’s more of a logistical problem in retail,” he said. it needs to be connected, and that needs to be done at night, when customers are not in the store. With vendors working in the outlets themselves, there should also be security staff and a manager. we need 2,500 for each of our stores. ”In the cloud, pressing the button can deploy hundreds of servers.
Data security is also an unavoidable challenge when it comes to the Internet of Things and other digital devices. “The more information you place in a place, the more you have to worry about protecting it, and the more dangerous it will be to create and steal information that can be accessed,” says Saville. But connecting to the edge computing and public cloud that support nodes in nearby data centers is generally more secure and reliable than what a trader can do on their own. Savill says edge providers, like public cloud providers, offer cybersecurity from a central location on a large scale so they can see what the threats are and how they affect their customers.
That said, the benefits and opportunities of the edge outweigh the potential challenges. “One of our biggest use cases for edge computing is at the point of sale, where we process millions of transactions,” Krishnan explains. There are many points of failure from the store to the cloud: switches, routers, telecommunication circuit, and cloud providers. “The edge gives us a lot of redundancy to process all transactions in-store and return to the cloud if the edge fails,” he says.
“The edge gives us full redundancy to process all transactions in the store and return them to the cloud if the edge fails.”
Shivkumar Krishnan, head of Gap store engineering
Gap has invested in medium-sized servers in recent years, says Krishnan, as part of a global platform that uses the latest technologies such as microservices, cloud computing, streaming services and engineering DevOps. “Now, with our platform, we can build, validate, and deploy applications with fast rotations — all on the same day,” he says. “I can remotely control and manage most of our 100,000 devices. Our sales partners use iPads that allow us to create intuitive mobile user experiences. ”
While Gap was at the beginning of the cutting-edge computer game, the challenge is to keep up with the latest and most advanced technologies, just like with the adoption of any technology. Today’s state-of-the-art servers have integrated graphics processing units, network routers, and 5G broadband technology, “all wrapped up in low-footprint devices built from the ground up for advanced machine learning,” he says. “Hopefully we’ll catch the next iteration of these advances and jump on the others that are now getting there.”
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