Help Center/ Intelligent EdgeCloud/ Service Overview/ What Is Intelligent Edge Cloud?
Updated on 2025-12-29 GMT+08:00
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What Is Intelligent Edge Cloud?

Edge Computing

5th generation mobile networks (5G) and artificial intelligence (AI) make innovative services, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), interactive live streaming, automated driving, and smart manufacturing, a reality for the world. These services demand for low latency and high bandwidth. Centralized cloud computing is generally far away from devices and has the following disadvantages:

  • High network latency: Centralized cloud computing cannot process and analyze data in a timely manner, resulting in slow application response and poor user experience.
  • High bandwidth cost: Data generated by applications needs to be transmitted to the cloud, which consumes large bandwidth. As a result, service providers need to pay a large amount of money on bandwidth.
  • Data compliance: Data generated by applications is stored on the cloud, whereas enterprises want sensitive data to be stored on premises to meet the requirement for data compliance.

Edge computing can resolve the preceding problems and becomes a good choice for these new services. Edge computing brings computation and data storage closer to where they are needed to improve response speed, save bandwidth, and ensure data compliance.

Figure 1 shows the differences between cloud and edge computing.

Figure 1 Differences between cloud and edge computing

Edge computing can be seen as the extension of cloud computing to the edge of the network, and the two are mutually complementary. To fit into the requirements in different scenarios, you need to leverage both cloud computing and edge computing to form an edge-cloud synergy.

Figure 2 illustrates the scope of edge computing.

Figure 2 Scope of edge computing

There are three rough categories of network latency, each defined by their distance from end users. From closest to farthest, these ranges are the field edge, the near-field edge, and the cloud.

  • Field edge: The network latency ranges from 1 ms to 5 ms, and computing power is primarily used for AI inference. Real-time services, such as autonomous driving and industrial Internet perform well at the field edge.
  • Near-field edge: The network latency ranges from 5 ms to 20 ms. 70% of the computing power is used for rendering, and the rest for AI inference. Video services are positioned to run at the near-field edge.
  • Cloud (or central cloud): The network latency is between 20 ms and 100 ms, and workloads that are not delegated to the edge, such as massive data storage, data mining, and training, are generally deployed on the central cloud.

For near-field edge and field edge scenarios, Huawei Cloud has launched Intelligent Edge Cloud (IEC) and CloudPond, respectively.

  • IEC provides a distributed edge cloud with wide coverage for customers to flexibly deploy services nearby.
  • CloudPond provides a solution that integrates software and hardware in a rack that can be deployed in your on-premises data center.

IEC

IEC is deployed closer to enterprises and areas with a large number of active users and provides the same experience as the parent region. It delivers a local network with latency below 10 ms for latency-sensitive applications such as interactive entertainment, online education, and media creation. It also allows for local data storage for sectors like finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and scientific research, to help them meet compliance requirements. Figure 3 shows the IEC architecture.

Figure 3 IEC architecture
  • IEC has its management plane deployed in the parent region and shares the console and APIs with the parent region. It does not have independent console. You can access the Huawei Cloud management console to purchase, manage, and monitor compute, networking, and storage cloud services required by your applications in IEC.
  • IEC uses Huawei Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) for account authentication, and Image Management Service (IMS) to provide private images required for creating instances.
  • With IEC, you can enjoy the following Huawei Cloud services or resources: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic IP (EIP), instances, subnets, security groups, Access Control Lists (ACLs), Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), and Elastic Volume Service (EVS).
  • IEC HomeZones are physically isolated from general AZs in the parent region. You can create a VPC across AZs to enable communication between them.
  • After enabling a HomeZone, you can see the HomeZones option in the region to which IEC belongs and create compute and storage resources and cloud services in the HomeZone for low latency and local data storage.

Why IEC?

Self-built services cost more and have higher security risks than IEC, and cannot keep pace with the needs of emerging applications. Figure 4 shows comparison between self-built services and IEC.

Figure 4 Comparison between self-built services and IEC

Figure 5 helps you further understand the IEC advantages in reducing network latency during edge service processing when compared with the traditional centralized public cloud.

Figure 5 Comparison between IEC and traditional public cloud

For details about IEC advantages, see IEC Advantages.