Fog Computing: The Middle Layer Your IoT Architecture Might Be Missing
Most IoT architectures look like this: devices collect data, the cloud processes it. Simple. Clean. And for a lot of use cases — completely fine. But as deployments scale and real-time decisions matter, that round trip to the cloud starts to hurt. That's where fog computing comes in. The Short Version Fog computing adds a processing layer between your devices and the cloud. Not instead of the cloud — between it and the edge. Think of it as a local coordinator: close enough to the devices to act fast, powerful enough to filter, aggregate, and pre-process before anything goes upstream. Why does it matter? Latency : decisions that need to happen in milliseconds can't wait for a cloud round trip Bandwidth : sending raw sensor data from thousands of devices is expensive — fog filters it first Reliability : local processing keeps working when the internet goes down Privacy : sensitive data can be handled locally, never leaving the site A factory floor, a smart hospital, a...