From individual users binge-watching Over-The-Top video services to enterprises deploying Software as a Service, cloud services are how people and organizations consume content and data. Now, a new generation of cloud-native applications is emerging in categories such as entertainment, retail, manufacturing, and automotive, which, in many cases, will be more compute-intensive and latency-sensitive. Traditional centralized cloud architectures will not meet the Quality of Experience expectations for these applications and will require a more dynamic and distributed cloud model. As a result, compute and storage cloud resources need to move closer to the edge of the network, where content is generated or consumed. This new approach is referred to as Edge Cloud. This paper examines the drivers and implications of edge computing and explores how Ciena’s Adaptive Network can provide an effective framework for the evolution to a distributed Edge Cloud architecture.

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