Before you invest in edge computing

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on edge computing, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Running closer to users removes latency you cannot optimise away
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Great for caching and routing, awkward for state. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Debugging across many locations needs deliberate tooling. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Three things worth confirming about edge computing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Debugging across many locations needs deliberate tooling — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.