The term “fog computing” was a buzzword that described edge computing as “a collection of numerous distributed tiny clouds deployed closer to the [IoT] devices at the edge of the network.” (VikingPLoP '16: Proceedings of the 10th Travelling Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs April 2016 Article No.: 13 Pages 1–10 https://doi.org/10.1145/3022636.3022649) The term did not persist for long. The term “distributed cloud computing” was also used before the industry settled on the term “edge computing.” Edge computing defines groups of devices paired with some computing and storage resources hosted at the edge of the Internet or other network.

The combination of the need to reduce bandwidth consumption into and out of centralized data centers and the huge projections for the deployment of devices at the edge drove the urgency for the development of distributed edge computing (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-99061-3_4).  There are also benefits for applications hosted at the edge that require low roundtrip latency for any data that needs to be evaluated before making an operational or control change locally. Applications that need to access high-speed, highly available services remotely, even for small amounts of data, are complicated when separated by a WAN link. Capacity planning and equipment sizing is also less risky when applications can be deployed in edge configurations using a few building block components.