The security fear along with the lack of visibility and controllability is being touted as the widely articulated and accepted drawback of cloud computing. Private clouds and cloudlets are the viable options. Yet, they too face certain limitations. However, the recent phenomenon of edge or fog computing has been pronounced as the most successful computing paradigm for surmounting all the cloud weaknesses.

Edge computing is all about shifting the data processing and storage from the centralized locations (cloud) to the distributed and decentralized environments (local). This means that by bringing in compute, network, and storage competencies closer to the users, the Quality of Service (QoS) attributes / the NFRs are readily and rewardingly accomplished. Traditionally, all the computing and storage takes place in cloud environments (on-premises and off-premises). However, certain scenarios such as real-time analytics and faster responses insist for computing at the user end. It is not an exaggeration to say that the QoS and experience goes up significantly when IT becomes people-centric, context-aware, adaptive, real-time, and multimodal. Real-world and real-time applications and services invariably pitch in for computing at the edges. There have been several architectural complications even for edge computing, and now with the faster maturity and stability of application and volume containers, edge computing innately gets the much-needed fillip.