There's really 2 things that you get. The first is that by having servers close to clients you can minimize latency, and you get scalability for free. The big a

There's really 2 things that you get. The first is that by having servers close to clients you can minimize latency, and you get scalability for free. The big architectural difference is that generally read/write databases become extremely challenging so you either have to get into some crazy CAP territory OR you architect around essentially event sourcing/logging. It works great for some applications, terrible for others.