In today’s rapidly developing digital age, edge computing is becoming increasingly popular. More and more services are being decentralized to the edge, which means that services are getting closer to the users, significantly improving user experience and reducing latency. The main advantage of the edge lies in its computing power, but when it comes to storage needs, edge computing often falls short. For example, in real-time communication (RTC) scenarios, when User A and User B are connected to different nodes, the room data required for their communication must be stored in a central location, which indicates that public clouds still play an irreplaceable role in such situations. Therefore, only the collaborative work of edge clouds with public clouds can create a more suitable system architecture.
However, cloud-edge collaboration faces various challenges in practical deployment: The stability of direct public network connections is hard to ensure; dynamically switching communication paths often cannot meet the strict immediacy requirements of real-time communication scenarios; irrational traffic scheduling at edge nodes may lead to increased costs at central data centers, etc.
At the ArchSummit Architect Summit to be held on June 14-15, 2024, in Shenzhen, we will delve into these issues. At this event, You Wangqiu, who is in charge of video architecture and intelligent networking at ByteDance, will introduce how Volcano Engine RTC achieves high availability in cloud-edge communications, share the challenges they face, and the experience and solutions they have accumulated. His presentation will focus on the experience enhancements and cost optimizations brought about by edge computing, as well as the introduction of stability issues in cloud-edge communications, all of which are essential elements in real-time communication scenarios. The combination of high availability and low latency, difficult to achieve in traditional practice, represents a series of challenges that the industry is currently facing.
Furthermore, it is also very important to understand the pain points in practical application of these technologies: one needs to have a deep understanding of different scenarios and make the right trade-offs; have a thorough grasp of the infrastructure, in order to make the best use of existing facilities; and inevitably, cost issues must be considered to ensure a balance between experience and cost.
Those who have a deep understanding of server architecture and are also familiar with edge computing scenarios will gain valuable insights from this presentation: understanding which key issues in cloud-edge communications might affect system stability and how to strengthen the architecture; as well as a deeper understanding of how the complete cloud-edge communication architecture evolves and how ByteDance addresses stability issues.
