Trust, the Cloud, and the Edge
Mike Bursell · 2020
This chapter considers important computing environment: what has become known as “the Edge”. In cloud computing, the hosting model views computing resources as being consumed by tenants. One important factor about most modern Edge computing environments is that they employ the same virtualisation and orchestration techniques as the cloud, allowing more flexibility in deployment and lifecycle management over bare-metal deployments. Cloud service providers (CSPs) can employ economies of scale that allow them to schedule workloads onto their servers from multiple tenants, balancing load and bringing sets of servers in and out of commission infrequently. The tenant has to rely on commercial relationships for trust establishment, whereas the CSP can rely on both commercial relationships and computational techniques. The chapter discusses some examples of mitigations that may be appropriate and also considers their efficacy and applicability for particular types of use cases. These mitigations include: commercial mitigations, architectural mitigations, and technical mitigations.