| We're still learning how to best describe this. Edge is a bit of a marketing term, we all might end up using something else to describe this down the road. Edge normally means "servers that are very close to your users". CDNs are specialized edges for caching HTTP content. Edge Apps are a lower level concept than CDNs, but you can picture the same thing. We have servers all over the world, we distribute your code to them, your users connect to whichever is closest to them. Heroku, and most of gcloud, are location specific. You deploy code, it runs in Ashburn Virginia, your users traverse the internet to connect to your apps (which adds latency). Our Edge Apps are most likely to replace a CDN, not replace your app hosted on Heroku. Lots of our customers run centralized apps and then write JavaScript to enhance them by caching partials close to users, or optimizing content as it gets shipped to users. |