3 ms·
Personally I see this as a 'why not, if it works' type thing. Sure you don't need it for 99% of usecases, but if it just works using familiar architectures the
by davnicwil 4y ago
Personally I see this as a 'why not, if it works' type thing.
Sure you don't need it for 99% of usecases, but if it just works using familiar architectures then it is also strictly better for 99% of usecases so you might as well, and people will naturally want it.
That 'familiar architectures' part is the hard bit, though.
- kevincox 4y agoBut it isn't better in 99% of use cases. Lots of use cases are rendering an API response or HTML page that involves multiple database requests. Therefore the distance between database and app server is more important than the distance between the client and the app server. Edge compute can be helpful for static or quite cachable content. But often this is handled as well or nearly as well by a caching CDN. So that leaves a few cases where edge compute is useful. Where you are globally distributing the data itself (and ideally moving the data around as your users travel or move) which is incredibly rare and expensive to build, and when you need pure computation that needs no request to your backend and if 50ms of latency is important for a pure computation most of the time you can just move it to the client. In my experience these tend to be rare. I would estimate that edge compute is actually helpful for 1-5% of projects, not 99%.