What to ask your agency about edge computing

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on edge computing, these questions are worth asking early.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Running closer to users removes latency you cannot optimise away. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Debugging across many locations needs deliberate tooling. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.