Google Distributed Cloud Edge

Why?

  • YouTube—growth in 2002 greater than capacity of the internet
    • Solution: build edge infrastructure across globe—early CDN

Problems Solved

  • Developer/ops productivity
    • Managed same as cloud
    • Containers
    • Declarative
  • HA
    • Wave-based rollouts
    • No single point of failure
  • Secure by default
    • Zero trust
  • Hardware supply chain
    • Google-scale—integrated with hardware vendors
    • Abstracted hardware—multiple vendors

Where to Run Apps

  • Cloud
    • Best when per-user/application bandwidth low
    • Blast radius of outages small
  • Edge
    • HA when network/internet unreliable or slower than aggregate bandwidth

Example Use Cases

  • Retail
    • Checkout
    • Predictive inventory planning and analytics
    • Warehouse surveillance
  • Public sector
    • Video-based traffic control
    • Surveillance
    • Smart ports/docks
  • Media and entertainment
    • AR/VR
    • Media caching/streaming
    • AI gaming analysis
  • Telco
    • 5G network modernisation
    • Private 5G
    • 5G edge
  • Manufacturing
    • Vision-based QC
    • Robotics
    • Remote control
  • Financial
    • Cyber and fraud detection
    • Data locality for branch security and banking
  • Healthcare
    • AI-driven imaging diagnostics
    • Remote assisted surgery
    • Patient remote monitoring

Not All Workloads Can Use Public Cloud

  • Regulations
  • Data volume
  • Connection durability
  • Link speed

Analysing Data at Scale

  • Telco
  • Healthcare
    • Patient data coming from edge locations
    • Regulations
    • Cloud stream to cloud—but value comes from real-time analytics
      • Streaming to cloud too slow e.g. large MRI scan files

Challenges

  • Financial services
    • Complex systems—disparate systems doing similar things
    • 30% of data to stay on-prem
    • Want consistent platform

How to Approach Security at the Edge

  • Telco
    • GDC Boundary Proxy—Google need to prove they can’t tamper with critical infrastructure
    • Sniff everything going between cloud and edge

Edge AI in the Future

  • Healthcare
    • Remote patient care
    • Specialists not in every location—postcode lottery
    • AI-assisted/remote surgery
  • Financial services
    • Data sovereignty
    • Fraud detection
    • How to run AI within regulatory frameworks around the globe?
      • Edge

Graph View