Total cost of ownership perspective of Cloud vs Edge deployments of IoT applications

The number of intelligent Internet-connected devices is growing rapidly and will soon be in the order of tens of billions, forming the Internet of Things (IoT). Each of these devices is pushing data to the Internet that are soon expected to reach tens of exabytes. It is expected that such data growth will put an unprecedented pressure on the current Internet infrastructure and the centralized (Cloud) data centers (DCs). In order to successfully deal with this imminent data flood, it is imperative to enhance the processing capabilities of the current servers. Redesigning data communication and processing across the Internet is equally important. Additionally, a new paradigm has emerged which makes Cloud services available at the Edge. One key ramification of these developments is an increase in the cost of both Cloud and Edge DCs. The main goal of this chapter is to improve the Total cost of Ownership (TCO) of Edge and Cloud deployments by discovering the capability of the underlying hardware components to function beyond nominal operating points. By taking the advantage of the extended operating margins, inherent to processors and memories, it is possible to improve the power efficiency of servers running in the Cloud or Edge. The successful exploitation of these margins will lead to significant cost savings. Thus, in this chapter we present an End-to-End TCO tool to evaluate two IoT applications. In order to come up with an End-to-End TCO evaluation, we have firstly determined the requirements and parameters of each of the two applications. Furthermore, the metrics of success related to each application have been determined as well. For instance, to evaluate Polaris application, we use TCO under various constraints, and for Social CRM we use TCO over client’s degree of satisfaction in square metric.