Recap of Bluzelle Live Webinar: Edge vs Cloud

Video & Text Summary + Q&As

Last week, CTO Neeraj Murarka hosted a live webinar on Youtube, in which he talked through how technology infrastructure will evolve from cloud to edge due to development of IoT and proliferation of devices. If you missed our live session, you can watch the playback now. Below the video is also a text summary of this webinar and the Q&As.

Today: The Cloud, Internet of Things, Smart Phones, and Status Quo

We are having an explosion of internet of things. You can find small and big devices all over the places like manufacturing industries and consumer businesses. Smart phones are becoming mainstream especially in developing countries. We can almost assume that every average citizen has a smart phone. The Internet is becoming democratized. It is no longer limited to users in traditional western industrialized nations.

What is the Edge?

There are lots of definitions of what it is. Think of a single client computer (e.g. someone from the web, or someone that is playing the game) that is accessing data, traditionally, it has to retrieve data from the cloud server which may be set up in other side of the world. This would take quite a while. However, an edge cache server (Bluzelle) will sit much nearer to the client, which largely accelerate the data accessing speed.

The idea here is to bring the data as close to the customer as possible — that’s what the edge is. Not like traditional cloud servers, edge servers are not in a single location but distributed everywhere in the world. No matter where the clients are, they will be close to one of these edge servers.

Edge computing is about bringing its edge as close as possible to the customer. The closer it is, the better performance gets.

Edge vs Cloud

Edge and cloud are generally opposites. Cloud concentrates power while the edge paradigm spreads it out.

The cloud is about consolidating power into data centers. You have to use services like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud platforms to access computing and networking resources in centralized locations. Edge computing’s goal is to move these resources away from data centers and bring them as close to the user as possible.

However, edge and cloud are not mutually independent. Edge networks can interact with cloud networks or can exist purely on their own. This is where decentralization comes into play.

Tomorrow: The Next Generation of Applications and Why They Need the Edge

The next generation of applications will not necessarily run close to these traditional data centers. They will run on smartphones and IoT devices which are widely distributed and closer to the consumers, but much further away from the cloud data center than before. Remember that traditional cloud data centers have to be physically set up in locations, which are expensive and time consuming.

Data needs are therefore now far more spread out all over the globe. There is a large opportunity for businesses to capture these new customers. Competitive advantage will strongly be defined by speed to access application data, and availability of this data. This requires bringing the data as close to the customer as possible, and ensuring it is always available.

The users are no longer consolidated to large cities in traditionally “developed” nations. The users are now far more spread out and away from the confines of established cloud data centers. Global competitiveness means reaching these users too.

The future is highly lucrative, with an explosion in IoT devices, smart phones, and applications that run on these devices. Developers must future-proof their applications, by having a dynamic architecture that adapts to the changing needs of the users, at the edge.

How the Blockchain Helps Bluzelle to Power its Edge Computing Network

There are four areas that where Bluzelle is using blockchain and decentralization to power our edge cache network. However, please note that Bluzelle itself is not a blockchain but borrows the concept of decentralization (e.g. consensus etc) to make our edge product more competitive.

Decentralizaton — There are no special servers or power authorities and where every node in the blockchain network is equally expendable. Bluzelle uses decentralization to achieve extreme edge computing abilities. Every server in Bluzelle is also equally expendable.

Reliability — Like blockchain networks, data is replicated as needed across Bluzelle’s network. If a server or even a whole bunch of them go down, Bluzelle continues to run smoothly.

Security — Attempts to attack a server or a group of them will fail as the rest of the network will reject such attacks.

Availability — Without defined points of failure, Bluzelle is robust — this means high availability (99.999% or better).

Bluzelle: Leading the Charge with its Edge Cache

Traditional caching layer was limited to Redis in singular cloud data centers. Bluzelle has a global network of edge servers, to cache data as close to the customer as possible, far beyond the reaches of the cloud. Bluzelle introduces an edge caching layer to replace or augment the traditional caching layer. Works with existing or new applications.

Bluzelle will replace DevOps with NoOps, meaning companies can focus on software development without managing backups, scaling, and security. Bluzelle is always on and already deployed.

Other advantages of Bluzelle include:

Uses the best of blockchain tech to provide consistently high performance and availability.

Partnered with global Tier-1 network to ensure Bluzelle will always have the consistently fastest connections with its network.

Comparable in cost to existing caches.

Can deploy into new or existing applications in < 10 mins.

Support for all major programming languages.

How do you make sure all data is synced in real-time when the data is all processed at the edge? Will it be slow?

We found it’s about 850ms delay from the time when data is written to the point it is propagated across the network. That is comparable to the speed of other key-value store services like Google, Cloudflare etc. One of our top areas in research is to have the fastest consensus algorithm to ensure data synchronization is fast.

How does Bluzelle handle content security and privacy issues?

The main thing that Bluzelle is protecting is the access rights. If you have a namespace of a key-value pair stored on Bluzelle, we will ensure nobody except authorized owners of that data can write to it, which is dictated by the private key. So if you own the private key to the namespace, you can write to that data. That is to ensure the authenticity of the data. Bluzelle currently does not encrypt data for you. The data owner can do this in the application layer. This is on our research roadmap.

How does token come into play?

We will release more details on token economy further down the road. We will see BLZ tokens being used in our upcoming release in November. BLZ tokens will be used as payment utility as well as compensation to farmers (network nodes).

Who do you see as the biggest competitor in the crypto industry?

We don’t really look at ourselves competing directly with companies in crypto. Our goal is to provide an edge caching layer, which is a new technology that we see developers are interested in. Our competitors are not necessarily from the crypto industry. There are existing caching solutions in the traditional space such as Redis on various cloud platforms.

Do you see all blockchains will move towards edge computing in the future?

We think the blockchain is using edge computing or is part of edge computing. Think of Bitcoin blockchain or Ethereum, their nodes are distributed everywhere. Every time you write data, it will propagate across whole network. When you read data, it is reading from the nearest node. Therefore blockchain is a good example of an edge network.

Why are big cloud companies like Google & Amazon not moving into edge computing?

Big cloud storage companies are adopting serverless computing. They are operating cloud data centers. They can’t technically adopt edge computing because edge is about moving beyond where the cloud data center is to much closer to where the customer is. Traditional cloud companies are limited to where the data center is. This is where Bluzelle’s opportunity lies.

Do you see examples of real world adoption of edge computing?

Edge computing applies to many existing applications, e.g. gaming. In a global multi-player game, you can have a client pulling the data from the edge rather than waiting 100ms for the data from a centralized server on the other side of the planet.

Bluzelle is designed in a way that you don’t have to replace your backend. You don’t have to replace any of your current DBs including MySQL, NoSQL, or caching services like Redis, but use Bluzelle directly on top of these to add global availability instantly to your data. In this way we can drive adoption of edge computing faster.

Are there any technical companies that are using Bluzelle right now?

We have companies that are moving in to using Bluzelle as a pilot. As Bluzelle’s data cache has launched in May. We are having initial customers coming in.

Are there any regulatory hurdles?

For our tech itself, we are providing infrastructure-as-a-service, which is not subject to any regulatory hurdles as far as we know. Tokens, financials or other areas in the company are separate issues from the tech.

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