Fog or Cloud? The Answer Is Yes.

#Discussion(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Caught up in the Fog

Gavrilovska says that on a basic level, the ideas behind fog computing—i.e., putting computational resources close to the data sources to accelerate time-to-insight and reduce costs—isn’t new. “What’s different now is that we have a confluence of recent trends which shift the cost of the pain point and the cost of the solution, and it becomes both critical and practical to start turning these ideas into reality,” she says.

Matt Vasey, director of IoT business development for Microsoft, http://www.microsoft.com, and an officer for the OpenFog Consortium, http://www.openfogconsortium.org, also suggests a number of trends have converged to make fog one of today’s hot topics. “The huge increase in compute and sensing capability at the edge has resulted in an explosion of data,” he says. “The old edge model, where all the data flows north into the cloud, cannot keep up with the increase in data resulting in missed opportunities to extract value. Fog computing provides a new model to process this data, to train new predictive models and operate them near the edge without the requirements to move all of the data to the cloud. The result is AI (artificial intelligence) near the edge that operates with less latency and more reliability.”

“Both (cloud and fog) provide absolutely essential ingredients for realizing connected world solutions.” –Ada Gavrilovska, Georgia Tech

Chuck Byers, principal engineer and platform architect, Cisco Corporate Strategic Innovation Group, explains it this way, “It’s the ability of two or more systems or applications to exchange information and to mutually use the information that’s been exchanged. It’s really about the data model. It’s about the information as the currency of the IoT. We don’t want a bunch of isolated silos.”

Byers stresses, “We want the ability for that information to flow freely, vertically, between the cloud, and the fog, and the edge, and the smart IoT devices.” He goes to explain, “We want it to flow freely horizontally across all of the different vertical marketplaces, different suppliers of equipment, and different folks who might be working on the data and those that want to use that data. We want the data to flow seamlessly.

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