Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1081695
34 I ICT TODAY In some hidden corners of the Internet, people can buy access to blocks of 50,000 computers and devices very inexpensively, drop the malicious payload and be on their merry way. This is not science fiction. This is real life. How do some of those transactions take place? Through cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin. MANAGEABILIT Y Today's developers are used to deploying software in large public clouds with well-formed application programming interfaces (APIs) that are crafted by tens of thousands of engineers. AWS (Amazon's web services division) employs something north of 20,000 engineers and they manage 56 physical locations. Compare that to the fact that there are approximately 1,500 offshore oil rigs around the world today or compare that to the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) estimate that there are 5.6 million commercial buildings in the U.S. It needs to be realized that in the future every single one of those buildings will house its own data center-like environment. That is the edge. It not just dwarfs the public cloud, it completely eclipses it. Oil rigs are relying on spotty communication choices like 3G, 4G, or Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT), and each rig is producing terabytes of data, so it is no wonder people are trying to run their compute on these rigs. Kroger, for example, has been installing racks of servers inside each of its approximately 2,700 grocery stores (Figure 3). Chick-fil-A has been installing servers in each of its approximately 2,200 restaurants. This is not just QuickBooks and time keeping software; this is software that may be running in a traditional public cloud environment. Managing this number of physical locations without a fraction of the same number of engineers is challenging to say the least. The current options leave much to be desired. In short, a lot of industries are embracing the edge for a lot of good reasons, yet the problems are monumental, with security being one of the most important. FIGURE 3: Grocery stores are installing sensors and servers to run software that will predict and detect refrigerator and freezer failures in order to mitigate product spoilage.