my journey with edge computing

Soon I will take a final exam of Software Engineering postgraduate studies at Poznań University of Technology. One of the postgrads subjects is an IT project that we are finalizing. We figured that it would be nice to serve the beta release widely in internet and that it could be deployed to cloud.

So I took the task and after some research (mostly involving free tier offers) I’ve chosen Cloudflare Workers which turned out to be a great stuff when it comes to developer experience and features available for free out of the box.

Killer features of this solution are that it’s not burdened with cold starts + runs at the cloud edge - close to the end users. Obviously this improves response times and saves bandwidth. WORLD WIDE.

But OK, why it’s like this? Here is the keyword: V8 isolates. I really recommend Cloud Computing without Containers blog post by Zack Bloom if you want to know more details. With this you can use languages that compile to either JavaScript or WASM.

Looks like AWS also spotted isolate’s potential and they’ve recently released a similar solution: CloudFront Functions which is different to Lambda@Edge. However if you dig further you will quickly realize that it’s not that rich as Cloudflare Workers and (at least for now) it’s limited only to JavaScript.

Anyway, two things are certain for me when it comes to edge computing: this is something that will have more and more use cases by the time and that Cloudflare is way ahead of AWS[1] currently in this area.

image taken from Cloudflare blog post by Zack Bloom: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/

[1] the context here is that isolates might be the next paradigm shift in the cloud and so far they’ve received much more attention from Cloudflare than from AWS

This post was origially published (behind authwall) at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-journey-edge-computing-jakub-ko%25C5%2582odziejczak