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CDN Edge Computing: Workers, Functions & Personalization

Medium

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Edge computing: moving logic to the CDN layer

Traditional CDNs cache static content and proxy dynamic requests to origin. Edge computing goes further: run application code directly at CDN points of presence, close to users. Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute@Edge, and Vercel Edge Functions all provide this.

The key insight: logic that was at the origin (A/B testing, auth, personalization) can often execute at the edge in <1ms instead of requiring an origin round trip costing 50–200ms.

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