Ben from the StackPath product team here. We agree containers or VM's may not always be the best available option for a workload. That's why we also offer an equivalent product to the one by Cloudflare (great product btw) - https://www.stackpath.com/services/edgeengine/

However, it should be made clear that our container and VM solution is not a "function" type offering. You can deploy a container and/or VM workload on our Edge similar to what you might find at Cloud providers. The main difference is we sit a layer above the cloud providers and make deploying worldwide simple, secure, and fast.

With a few clicks or a single API call you can deploy a micro-service all over the world (even add an anycast IP if you need one) in under 60 seconds.

Seems pretty pricey, smallest container is about $70/month for each region and each instance

Just saw the EdgeEngine post recently too, looks like some good competition to Cloudflare along with Fly.io.

The pricing is higher though and some early testing showed inconsistent performance, might have to wait until it matures a bit. Also missing IPv6.

What cloud provider is under the hood?

None, it's StackPath under the hood. We have over 65Tbps of capacity all self built/managed at the major IX's in the world.

With a lot of our experience coming from the original founding team at Softlayer, we've built an incredible Platform.

More information on our network can be found at https://www.stackpath.com/platform/network/

Are you guys running Knative or similar to handle the serverless workloads in your edge ?

We are not. Knative is a great project and something we're definitely looking into for more "function" type workload offerings down the road.

Today our container/vm solution does not have a warmup concept other than the initial deployment of your container. You simply specify your image, some attributes, and it's deployed to the locations specified on our Edge. Once deployed, you have the ability to delete the workload at any time, but it's not elastic based on requests to the workload.

Cool, so what's your container/vm orchestration layer then?

It seems like their initial edge Engine uses the same approach as CF: plain V8 runtime.

This announcement to me sounds like the approach didn't get the expected adoption and now they're allowing regular containers in the edge.

We prefer both :)

We've seen amazing adoption on the EdgeEngine product, it just serves a different purpose than full on Containers and/or VM's at the Edge.

The ability to run a container/VM at the Edge enables the ability to run more complex workloads outside of scripting in a CDN like delivery pipeline.

Is there an open source alternative to this shared runtime? I can't quite recall seeing this process-level isolation in the FaaS sphere, maybe except for gVisor. Thanks.