I began the process of updating and clarifying the first paragraphs of these articles. Improvements welcome.

Cloud computing makes computer system resources, especially storage and computing power, available on demand without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an Edge server.

Clouds may be limited to a single organization (enterprise clouds,) be available to many organizations (public cloud,) or a combination of both (hybrid cloud.) The largest public cloud is Amazon AWS.

Edge computing brings memory and computing power closer to the location where it is needed. Definitions vary.

Alex Reznik, Chair of ETSI MEC ISG standards committee, has a broad definition, "Anything that’s not a “data center." Other definitions are more limited. The State of the Edge report concentrates of devices "in close proximity to the last mile network." It is a distributed computing paradigm in which computation is largely or completely performed on distributed device nodes. Edge computing pushes applications, data and computing power (services) away from centralized points to locations closer to the user.

The target of edge computing is any application or general functionality needing to be closer to the source of the action where distributed systems technology interacts with the physical world. Edge computing does not need contact with any centralized cloud, although it may interact with one.