 Hi, I'm Heidi Joy Trethewey with the OpenStack Foundation, and I'm here with Beth Cohen from Verizon to talk about edge computing Which is some of the newest and most exciting technology that we've been talking about at the summit so far So Beth, would you tell us first of all? What is edge computing? Explained it to me in layman's terms. Oh in layman's terms So edge computing is taking Components and moving them out to the edges literally out to you know your phone your home And and basically having a cloud within your home. So that means Unlike, you know data centers where you know a company might have 10 or 20 or maybe 50 data centers Could have thousands or millions of these mini clouds all over the place And the question is is well, how do you how they how do they connect to each other? They might be? Meshed together or they could be You know connected hierarchically to a larger cloud That's the beauty of edge computing you can do all different types of architectures And can you help explain the difference between an edge computing module? Or might would you call it a node as as compared to like a container or virtual machine? Oh, well, we definitely would be called a node and and it's a self-contained unit unlike a container so a container is is a a piece of A piece of a larger operating system that is specific does a specific Microservice and it relies on other libraries and other support to function Okay, but in fact that box that I showed at the keynote is a self-contained box So that can work as a cloud without any other Connections to any other clouds. So that's really exciting to be able to do that I'm putting this on my Christmas list. I would like my own personal edge compute node in my stocking this year So tell us a little bit about how Verizon is using edge computing So the way we're doing is we're really taking Networking to the sort of the next generation So software defined networking as a concept has been around for a couple years We you know Verizon is as a strategy is is pursuing this strategy We announced it to you know to the world a couple years ago And and this is how it translates into reality. So You know traditionally that Networks were you know as I said earlier the data center is you know cloud was very data center centric And now we're taking that and and moving that out over the network because the reality is you know We've been doing networks for you know million years because that's what we do And now we're applying cloud concepts to networks, which is very cool Moving away from hardware and moving toward to our software model And that allows you a whole lot more flexibility than you've ever been able to do before just as cloud computing has enabled so much more Flexibility as compared to that traditional hardware model One of the things in the user survey that we find is that software defined networking remains a very high priority for our users People are really interested in it And so I wondered if you talk a little bit more about edge computing as it relates to networking and what the Possibilities are well edge computing is all about networking. So You know you can't use it without networking But but the nice thing is is that you can so think of it in this way you have you have something at the edge You have something in the center and you get to decide how much? Computing is out at the edge and how much is within the center So you can have something very skinny at the edge down to a little switch in the little box That that does nothing but send the packets back up to the services that are within the within the cloud Or you can have a full-blown cloud at the edge and and depending upon your your use case You can do either that's the beauty of it. I was wondering if you would give us maybe a real life use case That would help to make it a little more Concrete for what we would imagine seeing edge computing do so a perfect use case And many of our customers were asking for this or Remote site in a box So think of is my favorite example is the coffee shop So think of a coffee shop, you know When you go into coffee shop, you have guest Wi-Fi you have You know so you have networking right you don't even think about it and they You know, but they have they know that they need networking, but you know, that's not their core business This is selling coffee. So what they want is something that's easy and simple to deploy That they don't have to worry about and so that's what virtual network services gives them That ability to just you know plug in something that does, you know, it does security It does it does networking it does, you know, whatever you need it to do and you know Just don't have to worry about it Well, thank you for telling us more about this I'm really exciting to see what edge computing is going to do for all of us here in the future It's gonna be a lot of changes and all all for the good Well Beth Cohen from Verizon. Thank you