The Edge, the Cloud, and the Continuum

If we consider the cloud as the compute/data backend, and the edge the environment where the data sources are, we can imagine a huge space between them. That is what we refer to as the continuum, which can be single hop or multilayer multi-hop involving very diverse technologies. This is true regardless of whether the edge is big or small, is computationally-intensive or computationally-limited, is physically in close proximity to the cloud, or is really far away from a cloud-pick your other favorite char-acterizations here.