Edge Infrastructure: A Modern, Flexible Framework

IT leaders have no shortage of priorities to balance as they position their organizations for resiliency and growth. And one of the hotspots for growth and transformation is the Edge.

For IT, the term “infrastructure” evokes images of rows of server racks, cables, blinking lights, and cold rooms. Today, Edge Computing is changing the way we think about infrastructure. Edge computing takes workloads out of the data center and moves them into the field —  to the edge — along with all the compute, storage, networking, devices, and other typical infrastructure components.

For Lumen’s Chris McReynolds, edge infrastructure is distributed, spanning cloud and on-premises — think a retail point-of-sale — and flexible. It starts with defining the business outcomes you want from your edge deployments, McReynolds says in Episode 1 of Lumen’s podcast series (listen below).

“It’s really defining the outcomes you want on the front end, because edge infrastructure is used in a lot of different ways,” McReynolds says. 

McReynolds explains the breadth of edge potential, from custom virtual machines running on bare metal to a complete infrastructure platform ready for developers to do their thing.

“They want to build really cool web apps, really cool HTTP apps, and they just want a platform on which they can host those applications that is distributed across a lot of markets,” he says. “Being able to just deploy those to infrastructure that is distributed, has low latency, and runs well, makes it easier for enterprises to bring new capabilities and get to market more quickly.”

Listen to the full podcast here.