Why Edge Compute Changes How I Build

The pitch for edge compute usually starts and ends with latency: run your code in a data center near the user instead of one central region, and requests get faster. That's true, but it undersells what actually changes about the way you build.

When your runtime lives at the edge, the traditional split between 'CDN' and 'application server' mostly disappears. Static assets, cached responses, and dynamically rendered pages can all be served from the same place, by the same request handler, with the same deploy.

That collapses a lot of operational surface area. No more reasoning about cache invalidation between two separate systems. No more separate scaling story for your CDN versus your origin servers. One deployment target, one mental model.

The tradeoff is that you give up some of the assumptions long-running servers let you make: a persistent in-memory cache, a background job that runs forever, a process that boots once and stays warm. Edge runtimes are built around short-lived, stateless execution, which pushes state out to purpose-built storage instead of wherever happened to be convenient.

That constraint is annoying at first and clarifying later. It forces you to be explicit about what's actually state and what's actually just faster-to-write code, and usually the app is better for it.