The edgeEngine runtime is a distributed computing framework component that enables any network aware device to become a host for running microservices. The types of network aware devices that edgeEngine supports are cellphones, tablets, IoT devices, industrial equipment, home appliances as well as physical computers or virtual machines running as desktop systems or within a data center, to name a few.
As long as the device has an operating system that the edgeEngine runtime supports, that device can be transformed into a serverless microservices host that can be used by other devices running the edgeEngine runtime too. For example, imagine a cellphone running edgeEngine that's hosting a microservice that has ability to perform a special type of arithmetic calculation. Once that microservice is running on the cellphone other devices running the edgeEngine runtime can access that microservice to do the special calculation. (See Figure 1, below.)
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| Figure 1: edgeEngine allows any network aware device to host microservices in a serverless manner |
These various edgeEngine Runtime enabled devices that are running in a collective, collaborative manner make up the hybrid edge cloud. (See Figure 2, below.)
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| Figure 2: The hybrid edge cloud is a collection of edge devices running in a collaborative manner |