Edge Computing: The Future Era of Cloud Computing-A Review

Cloud computing has ruled the technical industry for almost more than 20 years and still an essential technology used in the IT industry. The major utilization of clouds was done during Covid-19 period where the entire 99% of the IT world worked from home. But as the world is progressing digitally very fast with the invention of 5 G, augmented reality, generative artificial intelligence, automation; the requirement data availability and access is in high demand. With clouds the era of digital data evolved. A cloud provides service on demand based on the pay as usage through Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Cloud works based on sharable resources and remote access depending on the user's time zone. Data storage and data accessibility are the two major concerns in the IT world. So, industry keeps evolving and edge computing started gaining popularity. Edge computing keeps the information handling and calculation on the boundary of the network nearer to the utilizer. So, the data will be available at the edge of the network itself irrespective of the zone. This feature of edge computing reduces the latency and mobility for the data access and search. The current work focuses on the comparison of cloud computing and edge computing highlighting their key areas of utilization. The article also provides a comprehensive study on edge computing and current application areas. The article tries to present a review of the fields of cloud and edge computing keeping the software industry as a viewpoint.