Of the many complementary technologies that enable IoT (internet of things) deployments, there are none quite as critical as the distributed architecture commonly known as edge computing. Technically, edge computing and its concepts are nothing new. In the 1960s, the Apollo missions that brought humanity to the moon relied on a distributed network of mainframes (see Figure 1). One was located in Houston and powered the console displays in the Apollo Mission Control Center. The others were positioned at antenna sites in California, Spain, and Australia. Even in those early days of computing there was a need to position compute resources …
