The edge computing value chain has similar elements to the cloud computing value chain. Figure 2 shows the four delivery models that form the edge computing value chain.
• Facilities. In the cloud computing value chain, facilities are synonymous with centralised cloud data centres. In the edge computing value chain, which consists of many more locations, facilities are buildings or land with a primary purpose other than housing data centres. These facilities can include car parks, rooms in multi-tenanted office buildings, retail malls, public venues or an operator’s central offices. Facility owners offer co-location services, including connectivity, power, security and space.
• Data centres. As the edge computing market grows, edge data centre providers are emerging to provide dedicated facilities for edge computing. Increasingly, such companies are acquisition targets for larger data centre providers. For example, Packet was acquired by Equinix and EdgeConnex by EQT. Some facilities owners may themselves equip rooms as data centres or put containers in their car parks that house data centre hardware, such as racks of servers and switches. Others may choose to partner with a provider of data centre equipment, management and connectivity services, as US cell tower company Crown Castle does with Vapor.io. Whether data centre providers are facilities owners or not, they sell co-location services into the edge computing value chain.
• Cloud stack. Edge computing is carried out using a stack of cloud technologies, including a virtualisation layer (hypervisor for virtual machine (VM) support or a container-based management system), virtual networking and storage technologies. The cloud stack makes physical edge data centre servers, storage and networking components available as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Facilities/data centre owners may choose to build their own cloud stacks based, for example, on VMware or RedHat technologies. Increasingly, public cloud providers (PCPs) such as AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft are making their public cloud stacks available in versions that can run in edge locations (Outposts/Wavelength, Anthos, Satellite and AzureStack, respectively). They are partnering with external facilities/data centre owners to build out their cloud footprints. Operators with MEC ambitions may use specialist edge cloud stack vendors, such as Robin.io or Wind River, to support edge computing in their network facilities.
• Application enablement services. These are middleware services that run on cloud stacks and which can be used by developers to create/support applications. Such services are delivered in a platform as a service (PaaS) model and may or may not be independent of the cloud stack provider.
• Application hosting. This involves the delivery, in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, of applications that have been developed for – or ported to – edge clouds to support business use cases that benefit from access to local compute resources. Such applications are typically provided direct to business or consumer customers by independent software vendors (ISVs). ISVs may hide from customers’ view (behind the application) the details of the edge computing value chain or allow customers to select the edge facilities that will host the application.
The edge computing value chain is more fragmented than the cloud computing value chain because it involves many more/different types of facilities owners. However, it is consolidating quickly as a result of growing interest in edge computing from large data centre owners, PCPs and content delivery network providers, with growing numbers of edge locations and extensive backbone networks that connect them.