Edge computing has gained attention from both academia and industry by pursuing two significant challenges: 1) moving latency critical services closer to the users, 2) saving network bandwidth by aggregating large flows before sending them to the cloud. While the rationale appeared sound at its inception almost a decade ago, several current trends are impacting it. Clouds have spread geographically reducing end-user latency, mobile phones' computing capabilities are improving, and network bandwidth at the core keeps increasing. In this paper, we scrutinize edge computing, examining its outlook and future in the context of these trends. We perform extensive client-to-cloud measurements using RIPE Atlas, and show that latency reduction as motivation for edge is not as persuasive as once believed; for most applications the cloud is already "close enough" for majority of the world's population. This implies that edge computing may only be applicable for certain application niches, as opposed to a general-purpose solution.

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In the early days of cloud computing, datacenters were sparsely deployed at distant locations far from end-users with high end-toend communication latency. However, today's cloud datacenters have become more geographically spread, the bandwidth of the networks keeps increasing, pushing the end-users latency down. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive cloud reachability study as we perform extensive global client-to-cloud latency measurements towards 189 datacenters from all major cloud providers. We leverage the well-known measurement platform RIPE Atlas, involving up to 8500 probes deployed in heterogeneous environments, e.g., home and offices. Our goal is to evaluate the suitability of modern cloud environments for various current and predicted applications. We achieve this by comparing our latency measurements against known human perception thresholds and are able to draw inferences on the suitability of current clouds for novel applications, such as augmented reality. Our results indicate that the current cloud coverage can easily support several latency-critical applications, like cloud gaming, for the majority of the world's population. CCS CONCEPTS• Networks → Network measurement; Public Internet.