Introduction to Edge Analytics

Everything old is new again! The rise of the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s and 1990s led to a revolution in computing. Instead of so-called dumb terminals connected to a large computer, many computers were connected in a network, spreading the processing power around. Edge analytics is like the personal computer revolution, but for IoT (Internet of Things) devices. We will start this chapter by comparing edge analytics to the computer revolution before we discuss the advantages of using edge analytics in an IoT application. We will look at the basic edge analytics architecture, as well as introduce the Microsoft Azure IoT Edge platform.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• What is edge analytics?
• Applying and comparing architectures
• Key benefits of edge analytics
• Edge analytics architectures
• Using edge analytics in the real world