The Cloud and the Edge: AI is forcing engineers to consider latency

A decade ago, we mostly thought of artificial intelligence as science fiction. First, there was machine learning, with its rudimentary data fitting suggestions, nondeterministic results, and recognizable algorithms. Before that there was the cloud.

Cloud computing became a buzzword in the age of big data, before computers learned to think, when larger data sets allowed us to begin searching for what was then often referred to as “business intelligence.” They could make workflows more efficient, store massive amounts of data, and receive dynamic on-demand services over the Internet. The cloud was born.

Now that AI is driving rapid change as neural networks do more of our thinking for us, leadership teams are… moving workloads back out of the cloud? It’s enough to give the average company a little whiplash. It’s only been some time since teams adapted business processes to “cloud-native” designs. Now this…