We believe the future of the frontend is "at the edge"[1], meaning it's as close to your customers as physically possible. The only way to beat the speed of light is to be closer[2]. Frameworks and tooling should be designed with this constraint from the start[3].

[1] https://vercel.com/edge

[2] https://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-application...

[3] https://vercel.com/features/infrastructure

My out of ass opinion. This edge stuff could be nice if only there was some good DB that utilised this model. Then we could have simple to write/work web apps competitive with mobile (if only Safari supported preload)

Planet Scale is probably the closest to what you're describing here.

https://planetscale.com/

They gave CDN a new name to milk venture capitalists.

To me, the difference between a CDN and an Edge Network is that the former is for hosting static assets, where as the latter is for both storage _and_ code execution.

The three major CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly) all support code execution at the edge, and all have (or will have) storage at the edge too

There's also a real question of whether Vercel and Netlify are really at the edge when they’re mainly running in AWS, GCP etc data centers rather than deploying their own hardware at edge locations, ISPs etc.

Don't get me wrong I think Vercel and Netlify are interesting but they seem to talk about being ‘on the edge’ while they really aren’t ATM

Shhh the vcs might hear ya haha