Comment by llsf

Around 2015, I was working for a company that processed coupons for large retail stores. We had lots of performance issues, mostly due to our centralized database at the time.

I was dreaming at the time to ship a mobile phone at every large store (e.g. Target) to process the data in-situ. It could hold its own database (partitioned for the tenant), it would have its own UPS (battery), and have enough CPU power to serve the POS requests of one store, even the largest ones.

A mobile phone would be our on-prem server.