From the Rural Edge to Data Centers in Space: State of the Edge 2022

### Overview In this talk, Jacob from Equinix presents an update on the State of the Edge report, an open, vendor-neutral community project under the Linux Foundation (LF Edge). He traces the initiative's history from its founding in late 2017 to its current growth stage within LF Edge, highlighting its purpose of establishing common language and definitions for edge computing. The session previews the upcoming 2022 edition of the report, discussing evolving market trends and calling for community participation.

### Key Topics - **History and Governance**: Started in late 2017 with an initial report in 2018 by organizations including Packet, Vapor IO, Ericsson, and Arm, the project joined LF Edge in 2020 as a Level 2 (growth stage) project with structured governance, an oversight committee, and a research committee. - **Standard Terminology**: The project maintains the Open Glossary of Edge Computing to offer shared definitions across different projects and industry participants. - **Preview of the 2022 Report**: Building on prior market-sizing research led by Phil Marshall at Tolaga, the 2022 report expands its focus to examine edge computing in the rural economy, emerging markets in Africa and South America, and satellite/orbital computing infrastructure. - **Infrastructure Evolution**: The presentation notes the changing physical geography of internet connectivity, expanding beyond traditional core cities into second- and third-tier markets driven by IoT and retail use cases. - **Community Collaboration**: The initiative relies on volunteer contributions, working groups, and professional authors, welcoming submitted essays and community input prior to annual publication.

### Technical Details Jacob discusses how edge computing demands high programmability and automation, paralleling the broader shift across open source over two decades from systems lacking APIs to ubiquitous API support. The speaker notes how cloud-native patterns and practices—particularly Kubernetes, which has transitioned from an emerging project into a standard—are being applied to manage uncloud-like, distributed edge environments. The physical internet is also shifting as companies expand infrastructure across India, Africa, and into orbit via satellite networks led by companies such as SpaceX and Amazon.

### Takeaways The State of the Edge project aims to provide vendor-neutral, de facto reference material and common vocabulary for the edge computing industry. Attendees and community members are encouraged to access the four existing free publications at stateoftheedge.com or join LF Edge working groups to review, edit, or submit essays for current and future reports.