Data Gravity, Data Sovereignty, 5G and Edge Cloud

The concept that Data resides on storage places and that Data transfer takes time brings about the concept of Data Gravity. Wherever a GB is created it must be stored and transferred as well. This requires storage space and network bandwidth.  If as in 5G there are mobile phones and other electronics creating a lot of Data then Edge processing should be the way for some applications due to the created Data’s gravity. If all of the created Data needs to be transferred to a Data Center far far away for processing then that will require network throughput which is slow and costly. This would mean that some calculations, inferences and data processing will probably be done at the edge.  In addition if Data Sovereignty laws are present in the country then Data will need to be stored within that countries boundaries at the country edge.

But it is interesting to note that Google search results are Anti Data Gravity where text is entered and a result appears very fast. The data of the search item is small and processing is done at backend data centers that are both near the edge POP and far far away. If search text is small and can be handled without much concern of Data Gravity then can other things be done similarly? At what data size and at what network speed are other similar processing works possible for other applications.

There must be a balance between Edge Processing for some applications and Central Processing of some Data then. 

These concepts don’t seem new. I think in Computer Science Intel’s Multicore CPUs and Oracle’s distributed databases will have dealt with these already. It is only that geographical size has changed and instead of a KB it became an MB and then now it is GB. It is only that instead of a single circuit board and a local area network the network has grown larger. Some of the basic concepts of Storing, Retrieving, Interlocking, Delay, Latency, Queuing, Caching, Paging and Number crunching etc would probably be the same even now. 

Habib