« Innovating the Edge at Google Next ’18
Google Cloud’s Next ‘18 is a wrap!
It was an exciting week in San Francisco for our team as we were able to publicly share some of the innovations we have been working on and learn more about what’s happening in the industry. Additionally, our CEO Doug Standley, was asked to co-present in an IoT breakout session titled, Finding the ROI in IoT, which featured our work at Deep Sky Vineyard.
One of the most interesting aspects of these large events (25,000 people!) is getting a feel for the conversations that seem to be trending throughout the conference. Because Next ‘18 was a Google Cloud event with a focus on developers, there were some announcements about Edge Computing that generated some significant buzz. Coincidently (wink wink), as a Google Cloud partner, we focused our demonstrations on how the nio Platform is innovating the Edge.
The Thin Edge
In what we called our ‘thin edge’ demo, our team showcased how logic can be dynamically moved between devices in a system. Our demonstration system included 5 devices:
- An Huawei Honor 7X Android Phone (CPU: Cortex-A53 (ARM) | niocore: JVM )
- A Raspberry PI 3B+ (CPU: Cortex-A53 (ARM) | niocore: python3 )
- A Seeed Respeaker (CPU: MediaTek MT7688 (MIPS) | niocore: golang )
- GCP Cloud instance (CPU: x86 | niocore: python3)
- Android Things Devkit (CPU: NXP i.MX7D (ARM) | niocore: JVM)
Using the nio Platform and Google IoT Core (Hi Google!), we showed how simple it is to redistribute workloads based on the various constraints within a system. With more and more decision making being pushed toward smaller devices at the edge, it will be vital that systems are able to work together to execute critical applications previously reserved for the cloud.
In our other on-site demonstration, we wanted to showcase how quick and easy it is to get distributed prototypes up and running with the nio Platform. To show this, we used Raspberry Pis to demonstrate peer-to-peer communication and allowed our booth visitors to build their own edge applications.
Interestingly, we found in talking with people during the booth demonstrations that our System Designer tool was a great “aha!” moment for a lot of people. The visual representation of the power of the nio Platform and the simplicity in which users can create distributed systems resonated with a lot of developers.
One of the things we as a team enjoy most about being at conferences is getting to interact with other technologists. It is a great opportunity for us to talk about why we are developing the nio Platform and to get immediate feedback outside of our current user base. Looking ahead in 2018, we’re excited about some big opportunities that we have cooking and have plans to share the nio Platform at some other global events. Keep an eye out for future announcements from our team.
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