What do you think about 5G vendors being able to also provide edge compute, which is more "edgy" than any CDN right now ?(they are literally going to be on every single block or street)
While 5G receivers will be on every block, nobody is going to be deploying custom code on the receivers. It's about a 10 ms round trip from there to the metro hub, where custom code will be running. (So roughly equivalent to CDN for wired/wifi connections).
> nobody is going to be deploying custom code on the receivers
Why do you say so? There's nothing technically stopping a teleco to add extra nodes there, use 10% for themselves and rent out the remaining 90% resources.
Technically, maybe, but telco's are not interested in that business. They know nothing about hosting user code, have no way to support a gazillion instances of random customers running random code on a gazillion nodes around the world in heat, rain, ice, whatever. How would you stand a chance doing customer support on that?
There's also security; they can't just store/process customer certificates on minimally secured boxes on street corners. Just about any useful code requires some kind of cert or secret or connection string somewhere. Cloud providers require all sorts of physical security restrictions, guards, cameras, sharks with lasers and such in order to host these things.
The way it's working now is telcos are outsourcing it to the cloud providers, and cloud providers are sticking racks in the carriers' metro hubs (with shark/laser requirements). These racks show up like mini regions in cloud providers' portals, so users can deploy VM's there just like any other region. Much lower barrier to entry that way.
Maybe someday you'll get sub-microsecond latency on custom apps from some box hanging on your street, but that's not coming anytime soon AFAIK.
> They know nothing about hosting user code, have no way to support a gazillion instances of random customers running random code on a gazillion nodes around the world in heat, rain, ice, whatever. How would you stand a chance doing customer support on that?
They are already doing that for their own code, no reason any CRUD app would behave much differently than teleco code. In fact teleco code has much higher SLO than regular web services.
> There's also security; they can't just store/process customer certificates on minimally secured boxes on street corners. Just about any useful code requires some kind of cert or secret or connection string somewhere.
Already solved problem by using SDS for mutual TLS.
> The way it's working now is telcos are outsourcing it to the cloud providers, and cloud providers are sticking racks in the carriers' metro hubs (with shark/laser requirements). These racks show up like mini regions in cloud providers' portals, so users can deploy VM's there just like any other region.
Do you have any source for this? Which cloud is providing such services and with which teleco?
I work in the field, but the info is all out there. Yeah AWS has partnerships with Verizon and a couple of internationals. Microsoft has AT&T. I don't think the deals are exclusive, just first attempts to get something going.
Interestingly when I took my job I also thought we were going to be deploying to every intersection, and was a bit disappointed when I found that the reality was much less interesting.
And just so you know, no the security angle is huge. Something like SDS may be fine for some purposes, but if there is anything valuable resident in memory or running over PCIE or whatever else, side channel attacks are real and people will steal them. Look up some hacks people do just to cheat at Xbox, it's insane. If you can't prove you're secure against that, you'll never get big money customers on your platform. Currently that still means sharks with laser beams.
