Overlay, underlay, and shared responsibilities

Should edge computing architectures care about the underlying physical infrastructure, or should architectures just assume that the underlay exists, has standard capabilities, meets industry norms regarding service-level agreements (SLAs), and is reasonably well-maintained, and then abstract away any details and differences?

Enterprises can continue to use network segmentation, which is an architectural approach to isolate the internal network from the rest of the internet. In so doing, it not only improves security and access control but also helps with performance by creating access policies that are enforced via firewalls. With newer technologies now, there are other options.

In this section, we cover different approaches to edge-friendly network overlay implementations. Along the way, we discuss how the overlay can assist with network-level application isolation and why that is important. By the end, solution architects should...