Networking & Delivery
Edge Computing
Running code at locations physically close to users rather than in one central data center, to cut latency for global audiences.
Edge computing pushes your code out to many locations near users instead of running it in one central region. When logic runs at an edge location milliseconds from the visitor, responses feel instant even for someone on the other side of the world. It grew out of the CDN idea, caching content at the edge, and extended it to running actual code there.
Cloudflare Workers are the clearest example, executing your code across a global network with almost no cold-start penalty thanks to a lightweight isolate model. Vercel and Netlify offer edge functions on the same principle, and Fly.io runs full containers in regions close to users. The common goal is collapsing the distance between user and compute.
The constraints are real: edge runtimes are limited environments, often without full Node.js APIs, and they're poor for anything that needs a database in a single region, since you've just moved the compute far from the data. Edge fits latency-sensitive, stateless work, personalization, auth checks, redirects, not your whole backend.