As the edge matures and edge sites become more sophisticated, creating edge infrastructure models is a necessary step toward understanding site-specific equipment and design standardization that can increase efficiency, reduce costs and streamline deployment.
Over the past decade, as the edge started to emerge as a critical part of the network and the larger data center ecosystem, the industry has struggled to consistently define or categorize edge deployments.
We took the first step toward categorization with the introduction of edge archetypes in 2018.
Grouping by use case was an important first step, but to fully understand the edge we had to dive into the details. There are many factors to consider when evaluating a potential edge deployment. We have identified the most significant of these and applied them alongside the original archetypes to help us better understand what physical form edge infrastructure is taking.
This paper advances the conversation from the broad categorizations of the archetypes to a more detailed and practical evaluation of edge use cases, industries, and external environments.
