We will go through four steps, how, why, where does it come from and then in the field success cases. We will move next to how Rapid.Space provides Edge Computing service in practice and then our Edge Acceleration Program that can make your organisation adopt Edge Computing and reap the benefits within as little as a few weeks to a few months of adoption.

Early forms of Edge computing has actually existed since the 1990s with one key application: Content Delivery Networks (CDN). CDN evolved in 2004 with proprietary implementation of popular application runtime (ex. J2EE) part of the CDN. But it is only in 2008 that appeared a general purpose form of edge computing that could replace cloud.

Edge Computing is very similar to cloud in that it completely automates all the aspects of an IT Service. Rather than paying a system administrator to install, update, monitor, optimize every service, this is done by software completely automatic. The more customers one has, the more we can automate and accelerate how a database works, how a CDN works, how a virtual machine uses RAM. That's automation and there is no difference in that aspect between edge and cloud. The big difference is the way a cloud system is designed is to operate a few data centres with thousands of computers each, whereas edge computing is designed to automate and operate thousands of data centres with a few computers each. This is fundamentally the difference.

How does it look? There is not a single kind of edge computing. We try to see edge computing as 3 different types: edge Data Centre, Campus edge and edge IoT.

An edge Data Centre is like having your cloud data centre less than 100 km away from a factory or office. With Campus Edge, and edge server is placed in an office, factory, student campus with less than 1KM away. And with edge IoT, the edge computing workload is running directly into a connected thing.

And edge Data Centre is around 16 to 32 servers in a rack, circa 50KM away and will use the same hardware as Facebook or twitter for their own cloud, called Open Compute. Looks like a mini cloud close to where you live.

Campus type Edge looks like a small server placed in a very short-size rack in the factory or the office, somewhere in a storage room. Low power, low-profile, small size.

Edge IoT will be using very small embedded systems that can feed in the drone or a machine tool or 5G base station and that will look more like embedded boards.

Edge Data Centre is suitable for use cases with require at most 1 millisecond latency such C-RAN. Campus Edge is suitable for at most ten microseconds latency use cases such industrial automation. Edge IoT is suitable for at 10 nanoseconds latency use cases such as radio unit, industrial coupler or autopilot.

Edge Computing has five basic advantages: resiliency, latency, availability, legal immunity, economic efficiency.

Resiliency that's when you are running campus edge, you can still run your office or company even if the internet has been cut. Nowadays the internet can be cut more frequently that we used to imagine. In Algeria in North Africa, each time they have exams for university they cut country-wide access to the internet so students cannot use it for answers to exams. This also cuts the internet in factories, this is why if you use cloud then you are cut, while if you use campus edge then you are not cut. Geopolitics also create barriers with congestions or deep packet inspection (DPI) which prevent you accessing cloud. For example developers in Iran cannot use GitHub in the USA. Many enterprise web sites hosted in US are blocked in Chine. Many enterprise web sites hosted in China are blocked outside China. With an edge architecture, such as DC Edge or Campus edge you can bypass these geopolitical challenges.

Energy also has a significant cost now, for example hosting edge in your home in France you get much better price than in your office due to energy subsidies that are only applicable at home, or hosting infrastructure in certain countries, such as Spain and Germany, you get a better price in one country because the rules for energy calculation are different. Availability is also important because sometimes energy becomes less available, in some countries there are energy shortages. Some countries use coal to produce electricity while others use hydroelectric/renewable power. With edge you can make your own decisions to navigate energy costs, geopolitical challenges, environment, everything is your decision. 

The second advantage is latency. If you have to drive machineries in a factory, you can't have your server on the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific because that would mean 0.2 seconds latency which is huge and means that if for example a worker's hand goes into a machine and the sensor would only realise after 0.2 seconds which could be life threatening. The latency is also important for 5G applications and robotics drones.

Availability is when you need cloud and there is no hyperscaler service such as in Namibia, they need Edge in order to have all the services of cloud which can be used locally. 

On immunity and compliance, as you can decide where the edge node is located in the factory or in the country then you can decide which law applies. For example, the Cloud Act in the United States has extra-territorial reach, just like the Chinese Cyber Security Law. Whenever your data is hosted in a data centre outside your country there is a risk that your data is being monitored without your knowledge.

Economic efficiency. Economy's of scales are a good thing. Both cloud and edge give the ability to scale and implement automation, however when huge data centres are made, after a certain size diminishing returns ultimately lead to inefficiency and make you less competitive. With Edge the size can be adjusted to be small enough to mitigate the problems of diminishing returns and thus maintain efficiency and competitiveness. 

Edge Computing has been deployed in real world much before it gained popularity. Early success cases consist of deployments based on cloud automation technologies in various context where public cloud is not an option.

Rapid.Space has designed a consistent offer to accelerate the adoption of edge in your organisation and benefit from the unique competitive advantages of SlapOS edge operation technology.

As the creators of general purpose Edge Computing in 2008, Rapid.Space has 15 years of experience. Rapid.Space's edge technology has already been deployed at Stellantis, FiatChrysler, Airbus, Kyorin (Japanese drug company), Toyota, MBDA (missles), Woelfel (engineering for German industry), SANEF (highway company), Oregon department of transportation, etc. All these companies or government bodies currently use Rapid.Space edge technology. That's why our feature set is already quite wide. It has a built-in Platform as a Service (PaaS) to automate all developer work, it has a software defined network (SDN) that reduces latency globally, content delivery network (CDN) that can accelerate website similar to Cloudflare or Akamai, but in our case open source. We have IoT gateway in order to buffer data from factories or from sensors before they are sent to big data lake. We have virtual PLC for industry for 4.0 to automatically control machines. Also we have support for vRAN that is currently used by telecom industry for 4G/5G and embedded push to talk server. Hard-real time to reach hard limits in terms of deterministic operating system, sub 10 microseconds.

One of our latest innovations is called cloudless computing which further simplifies the adoption of edge and drastically cut costs by making 90% of the server infrastructure irrelevant.

All of this is available in Rapid.Space.

How we are different from other vendors is that all our products are resilient by design. We provide automated disaster recovery by copying and rebuilding systems on multiple sites in the world, completely automatically. The sites can be your sites, our sites, depending on you. It has self optimising IPV6 overlay that can circumvent congestion and/or sometimes blockages by governments. For example, if you have a factory in Europe and China then they can communicate and exchange data with no challenges. We provide ITAR free hardware and software for legal immunity which means the hardware we use some is from USA components but we also have "made in China" CPUs which are free from any form of export control or restrictions which actually protects from the risk of being under the scope of certain laws whether in Europe or USA. Of course we also supply made in Europe hardware to suit European customers. Overall providing legal immunity.

The credential management has a zero knowledge feature where we can construct things so that we don't know any of your passwords or whatever is required to access your system. Only you know the credential ensuring that even if in Rapid.Space we have unforeseen bad actors, we won't be able to see into your edge system. And we won't be able to provide your credentials for foreign governments.

We are fully open, you can copy our hardware and software and fully copy our open process. This way, whatever happens you can fully replicate our edge service at any time, guaranteeing that no matter what happens with geopolitics, operation of your services can go on. True resiliency from the outside.

We are interoperable by design, much more than others. For example, we use OPC-UA industrial standard, IEC-61131-3, PLCOpen, TSN. Our routing is based on RFC 8966 also known as Babel. We are standard based.

We are CPU independent, whichever you prefer is OK: Intel, AMD, ARM, NXP, ST, Hygon, etc.

We are OS independent, which means any Linux distribution, FreeBSD or any POSIX operating system can run native edge cloud workloads without requiring virtualisation. This is quite unique to our technology.

For Windows, we use virtualisation.

We are already deployed on AWS, Azure, GCP, Alicloud, Tencent cloud. All of these already run some Rapid.Space workloads with SlapOS, our underlying edge stack. This means we are a already a multi-edge cloud provider.

We can deploy our edge on VMWare, Openstack or VATES xcp-ng. We are fully interoperable and deployed on 3rd party private clouds.

And you can purchase hardware such as Open Computer (OCP) servers, Dell, HP, Inspur, Raspberry Pi, Olimex and simply run Rapid.Space on it. Nothing can block Rapid.Space running on any off-the-shelf hardware environment.

For pricing, if you have to run up to 5 instance that is 10€ per mont, up to 20 instance that is 20€ per month, 80 instance is 40€ per month, and beyond 0.5€ per month per instance. This pricing is flexible enough to support the different types of edge computing: DC, Campus and IoT. 

Now that you know that Edge works, Edge is efficient, has many advantages and is interoperable with essentially everything, how can your organisation adopt Edge?

We created different programmes to accelerate edge adoption in your organisation.

In summary.

EdgePOD 450€, for organisations with Linux developers or system administrators.

EdgePOD Executive 4,450€ for organisations with digital transformation executives.

ORS, 850€, if you need private 5G.

POD, 15,000€, if you need DC Edge.

EdgePACER, 20€, for education and IoT.

Depending on the programme you will have dedicated support, up to 80 hours of developer expertise or technology tailored webinar.