Ask HN: Do we need independence and autonomy in Edge-Cloud?

I’ve been thinking about a different way to frame edgecloud infrastructure: not as an extension of hyperscalers, but as the first autonomous hop for devices — controlling what flows upstream to any cloud.

In this model, a fine-grained edgecloud mesh of small to medium sites sits close to users, data, and physical systems, mediating connectivity before anything reaches large centralized providers. Instead of trying to regulate hyperscalers directly, policy, security, and operational constraints could be enforced architecturally at this first hop.

A common objection is that a wide edge mesh increases the attack surface. I’m not convinced that translates to higher real-world risk. When failures or breaches happen at the edge, the blast radius is local: data loss and service disruption stay contained. When a hyperscaler fails or is breached, the impact is global.

We already see signals in this direction (e.g. NVIDIA–Nokia, AWS–Ericsson). The open question is whether the edge becomes just another hyperscaler-controlled layer, or whether a more federated ecosystem — built by many operators and vendors — can realistically deliver better resilience, security, and innovation.

From a systems or operational perspective: does a federated edgecloud mesh actually rebalance risk and control, or do coordination and complexity costs dominate in practice?

2 points | by Dutchhack 3 hours ago

3 comments

  • Dutchhack 3 hours ago
    One serious doubt I still have is this: there’s a huge open-source community producing excellent building blocks, but turning those into integrated, production-grade edgecloud platforms seems to require either very large capital (i.e. big tech) or a level of sustained focus that’s hard to achieve. That raises a question for me. Is the missing piece actually money and scale or is it where and with whom this integration happens? In other words, can domain-specific Edge-cloud systems realistically be built and maintained by smaller, focused teams working closely with the stakeholders who need them, or does this inevitably collapse back into hyperscaler-led platforms? Anyway would an initiative such as now being launched in Europe, the OFEIA fly ? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/open-federated-edgecloud-infr...
  • Dutchhack 3 hours ago
    To be clear, I’m not arguing against hyperscalers they’re obviously extremely good at what they do. The question is whether all device-adjacent workloads should default to them, or whether there’s value in introducing an autonomous first hop that can enforce locality, policy, and failure containment before anything goes upstream.
  • Dutchhack 3 hours ago
    On the security point: I’m genuinely interested in counter-examples. My intuition is that attack surface and attack impact are often conflated. A wider mesh may expose more entry points, but the blast radius of compromise is much smaller. Curious how people who’ve operated distributed systems see this trade-off in practice.