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Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies.
This month, we focus on "Edge Computing: The Evolution of the Decentralized Cloud". These core topics span the entire "diffusion of innovation" graph in our 2023 Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report. We see increasing adoption of decentralized applications (dApps), Wasm at the edge, and correctly built distributed systems.
Key challenges remain in this space, including matching user requirements with project goals (i.e., is decentralization a common need, as seen with the inability of Blockchain to become mainstream), assembling and using edge development toolchains, and running and observing decentralized applications.
News
KubeCon NA 2022: Edge-Native Application Principles
Edge computing is an extension of cloud computing. Companies are interested in bringing their cloud-native infrastructure and applications to the edge. Kate Goldenring and Amar Kapadia spoke at last year's KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 2022 conference about progress made by the CNCF IoT Edge working group on principles to consider for edge-native applications in order to enable successful projects. They discussed nine "edge native" principles in the areas of scalability, observability, and ease of deployment on the edge.
Amazon Releases Elastic Kubernetes Service for Snowball Edge
Earlier in the year, Amazon released Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere on Snow. This release automates creating and managing EKS clusters on AWS Snowball Edge devices. These devices can run with or without an internet connection.
With this release, a newly ordered AWS Snowball Edge device can come pre-installed with Amazon EKS Anywhere. Amazon EKS Anywhere is an open-source deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables running Kubernetes clusters on-premises.
Living on the Edge: Boosting Your Site’s Performance with Edge Computing
Erica Pisani, senior software engineer at Netlify, presented at QCon London on what edge is, how running code and serving data on the edge can improve site performance, and how to leverage these options effectively in a site to maximize site performance with minimal architectural changes.
Pisani started explaining what Edge is, presenting the concepts of cloud regions and their availability zones, taking AWS as an example (the same applies to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure). Pisani describes "The Edge" as data centers outside the availability zones.
Vercel Launches Edge Functions to Provide Compute at the Edge
Late last year, Vercel announced the general availability of Edge Functions, which can be written in JavaScript, TypeScript, or WebAssembly functions. According to the company, these functions are generally less expensive and faster than traditional Serverless Functions.
Earlier, the company released Edge Functions as a public beta and improved performance by placing deployed functions into a specific region. In addition, it added other features such as support for WebAssembly and cache-control standard for function responses and the ability to express region preference.
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Case Study
The Process of Creating Decentralized Apps (dApps)
Nowadays, we use ordinary traditional apps as part of our daily tasks. The applications that we are using are similar, even if they look different. All of them have the same architecture structure, and rely on synchronizing data with centralized servers.
On the other hand, decentralized applications have a different architectural approach. They are working on distributed ledger technology called blockchain, where there is no central point of failure nor third parties involved. This makes the technology revolutionary and attractive for new opportunities. Web3 and dApps are such new opportunities.
The process of creating decentralized applications is complicated, and the first challenge to make such an app is to understand what blockchain is, how it works, and what kind of problems it solves. This will help to understand why the application needs to be decentralized and whether it might succeed.
Such a deep understanding will help you to understand your project and define the risks. Knowing all the key facts and significant concepts of consensus algorithms, blocks, and transactions will help you to scale the application if needed. The architecture of dApp is quite different from traditional applications. Decentralized applications require a unique system design to achieve high security, reliability, privacy, and usability.
Testing its smart contracts is the most essential part of creating a decentralized application. An application free of security flaws and bugs will complete the security of the contracts and thus help the application to become viral.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Ognyan Chikov, "The Process of Creating Decentralized Apps (dApps)".
To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "Edge Computing", "Distributed Systems", and "Cloud Computing" on InfoQ.
Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ.
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