Future of Edge: 4 Trends to Watch for in 2022

Expect 2022 to be a banner year for edge computing. Organizations will increase investment and innovation as they push their applications as close as possible to where customers and data reside, says Walt Noffsinger, VP of Product, Section.

The past year has seen rapid growth on the digital front, and next year promises more of the same as companies move to adapt to changing customer demands and expectations. Gartner’s 2022 CIO and Technology Executive SurveyOpens a new window forecasts IT budgets to grow at their fastest rate in more than a decade, driven largely by the deployment of emerging technologies. 

Nowhere is that truer than edge computing. Both Forrester and Gartner predicted that 2021 was when edge computing would hit its stride. In fact, Gartner, in its 2021 Strategic Roadmap for Edge ComputingOpens a new window , wrote:

“Edge computing is entering the mainstream as organizations look to extend cloud to on-premises and to take advantage of IoT and transformational digital business applications. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must incorporate edge computing into their cloud computing plans as a foundation for new application types over the long term.” 

Suffice to say, 2021 was a big year for edge computing, and we see this increased investment and innovation continuing in 2022. Here are a few of my predictions for edge computing in 2022:

1. Use of Containers at the Edge Will Continue To Grow

Last year, Gartner predictedOpens a new window that more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, up from less than 30% in mid-2020. Containers and edge computing are an excellent match because combining the two allows developers to package everything needed to run an application at any scale and in any environment and do so much closer to end-users. The Internet of Things, online gaming, video conferencing and a whole host of emerging use cases mean the use of containers at the edge will continue to grow. Moreover, as usage increases, so too will organizational expectations. Companies will demand more from edge platform providers in terms of support to help ease deployment and ongoing operations.

2. Kubernetes Will Become Central to Edge Computing

Since its launch seven years ago, Kubernetes has rapidly gained widespread adoption as the go-to platform for container management. Not surprisingly, because Kubernetes is making container orchestration easier than ever to manage, it’s playing an increasingly critical role in edge computing. Hosting and edge platforms built to support Kubernetes will have a competitive advantage in being able to flexibly support modern DevOps teams’ requirements. Edge platform providers who can ease integration with Kubernetes-aware environments will attract attention from the growing cloud-native community; for example, leveraging Helm charts to allow application builders to hand over their application manifest and rely on an intelligent edge orchestration system to deploy clusters accordingly.

See More: 5 Reasons Your Organization May Migrate to Kubernetes in 2022

3. CDN Attempts To Reinvent Themselves Will Gain Pace

 Since the late 1990s, content delivery networks (CDNs) have been instrumental in optimizing web traffic and website performance. While some may consider CDNs the first generation of edge computing, their traditional core competency of ensuring high availability content delivery across a geographically distributed network of servers does not meet the needs of continually evolving edge workloads. What’s more, many legacy CDNs are losing ground because of their difficulty supporting the rise of new technologies, like serverless and containers, that continue to gain market share.

But CDNs are not sitting idle. In the year ahead, they will increasingly recognize the need to diversify away from the steadily declining margins of large object (e.g., video and download) delivery. In addition to reinventing themselves as application security platforms, CDNs will continue to lean into the application hosting market. Cloudflare and Fastly have built on their existing infrastructure to deliver distributed serverless. We expect other CDNs will enter and/or expand offerings focused on the application hosting market as they seek to capitalize on their investment in building distributed networks. 

4. Telcos Will Rise

With the continued rollout of 5G infrastructure and the supporting open networking approach, telcos are finding themselves in a unique position. At worst, they’ll augment the cloud revolution, but at best, they can even challenge the incumbent cloud providers for a share of the massive (and expanding) application hosting market. Telcos will start developing more mature approaches to application hosting and leverage their unique differentiation of massively distributed networks to deliver hosting options at the edge. Additionally, more partnerships will emerge to facilitate the connection between developers and telcos’ 5G and edge infrastructure to solve their lack of expertise in this space. 

Overall, 2022 is shaping up to be another banner year for the edge as organizations look to push their applications as close as possible to where customers and data reside.

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