Management wants everything in the cloud. I am arguing for local processing. Am I crazy?Solved

Good luck with management. It is not just about buying expensive hardware. It is literally about physics and bandwidth. 

If you send every single temperature reading to the cloud, you are choking your network with useless data. Think about it. The sensor is just yelling “Temp is normal” a thousand times a day over your Wi-Fi. You only want the edge gateway to ping the cloud when there is an actual problem. 

More importantly, look at the latency. If a piece of machinery overheats, you cannot afford a 300 millisecond roundtrip to a server in Virginia just to tell the machine to shut off. That logic must live locally on the edge. Tell management that edge processing is an insurance policy against lag and downtime. 

I feel your pain on the warehouse scanners. We lived through this exact nightmare two years ago. 

We put a cloud dependent inventory app on 50 tablets. The second a forklift driver went into Aisle 12 (our notorious Wi Fi dead zone), the app would hang while waiting for the cloud to validate the scan. The drivers were literally rebooting their devices out of frustration because they thought the app crashed. 

We ended up reconfiguring the app to process things locally. Now the software is set up to automatically download a copy of the day’s inventory list straight to the tablet’s internal storage every morning at 4 am while the devices are on the charging docks. 

When a driver scans a barcode, the app checks the item against the tablet’s own memory instead of reaching out to the cloud. It works instantly even if they have zero Wi Fi signal. Once they drive back into a good coverage area, the app quietly syncs their scanning history to the server in the background. 

Do not let them build a system that breaks the second your internet provider has a hiccup.