Wavelength, an edge computing service that Amazon Web Services Inc. is delivering with help from wireless carriers, today became generally available in Boston and San Jose, California.

Use cases for the service range from video streaming to medical image analysis and factory monitoring. 

The idea behind Wavelength is to give latency-sensitive applications a speed boost placing them physically closer to the data they process. The nearer a workload is to the data source, the less time it takes for information to cross the network. The results also take less time to be transmitted back and processing is completed faster as a result.

With Wavelength, AWS has implemented this concept by placing some of its infrastructure in wireless carriers’ data centers and allowing customers to deploy their applications there. Carriers’ data centers, by virtue of being part of the internet network that serves a given area, are often closer to users than AWS’ cloud facilities.

Verizon Communications Inc. is the network operator with which the cloud giant is working to provide Wavelength in Boston and San Jose. Over the next few weeks, AWS plans to extend availability from San Jose to the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s also working with Verizon to add additional U.S. locations later this year.

AWS’ long-term goal is to take Wavelength global. The cloud giant detailed today that it’s also working with multiple international telecommunications providers to make the service available in Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Under the hood, Wavelength environments offer customers a choice of three general-purpose instances and one EC2 G4 instance with an attached graphics card. On the storage front, there’s support for the Elastic Block Store service. Developers can interact with Wavelength using the same application programming interfaces through which they access regular AWS infrastructure.

Several early customers have already started applying the service in projects. LG Electronics Inc. is employing Wavelength to develop low-latency road safety services for vehicles, while Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. used it in an application that provides automated quality inspection of assembly lines. Sony Corp. has also adopted Wavelength to support real-time video streaming use cases. 

“With AWS Wavelength, our customers can develop applications that take advantage of ultralow latencies to address use cases like machine learning inference at the edge, smart cities and smart factories and autonomous vehicles – all while using the same familiar AWS services, API and tools to deploy them to 5G networks worldwide,” EC2 Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement.

Photo: AWS