Edge is everything that runs outside the cloud — on the local gateway that sits next to the sensors, actuators and machinery. It is the platform’s presence in the physical world: it speaks the messy local protocols, survives flaky connectivity, and keeps control loops fast even when the link to the cloud is down.
Responsibility in one sentence
Run reliably on constrained, sometimes-offline hardware — collect telemetry, enforce local rules in milliseconds, and synchronise state with the cloud the moment connectivity allows.
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Collects telemetry from drivers, buffers it locally and publishes to the cloud broker.
Evaluates rules on the local stream for low-latency, offline-capable control.
The edge is not a small cloud. It is shaped by the hardware it runs on:
Telemetry leaves the edge and flows into the alert pipeline:
Commands from the cloud are dispatched down to the gateway: